ct, and showing no sign of acquaintance with anyone on board. The
child dragged himself wearily along behind them, looking sometimes from
side to side at the various people passing by, with eyes no less furtive
than his mother's. She was a tall and handsome woman, with extravagantly
marine clothes and much false hair. Her companion, a bulky and
ill-favoured man, glanced superciliously at the ladies in the deck
chairs, bestowing always a more attentive scrutiny than usual on a very
pretty girl, who was lying reading midway down, with a white lace scarf
draped round her beautiful hair and the harmonious oval of her face.
Daphne, watching him, remembered that she had see him speaking to the
girl--who was travelling alone--on one or two occasions. For the rest,
they were a notorious couple. The woman had been twice divorced, after
misdoings which had richly furnished the newspapers; the man belonged to
a financial class with which reputable men of business associate no more
than they are obliged. The ship left them severely alone; and they
retaliated by a manner clearly meant to say that they didn't care a
brass farthing for the ship.

The group on the steerage deck was of a very different kind. It was made
up of a consumptive wife, a young husband and one or two children. The
wife's malady, recently declared, had led to their being refused
admission to the States. They had been turned back from the emigrant
station on Ellis Island, and were now sadly returning to Liverpool. But
the courage of the young and sweet-faced mother, the devotion of her
Irish husband, the charm of her dark-eyed children, had roused much
feeling in an idle ship, ready for emotion. There had been a collection
for them among the passengers; a Liverpool shipowner, in the first
class, had promised work to the young man on landing; the mother was to
be sent to a sanatorium; the children cared for during her absence. The
family made a kind of nucleus round which whatever humanity--or whatever
imitation of it--there was on board might gather and crystallize. There
were other mournful cases indeed to be studied on the steerage deck, but
none in which misfortune was so attractive.

As she walked up and down, or sat in the tea room catching fragments of
the conversation round her, Daphne was often secretly angered by the
public opinion she perceived, favourable in the one case, hostile in the
other. How ignorant and silly it was--this public opinion. As to