hey had taken what they could get at the
eleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in the
Norumbia. It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room. It was
on the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there had
been any sun it could not have got into their window, which was half the
time under water. The green waves, laced with foam, hissed as they ran
across the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned like the
wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, and
looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he was
going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, "Are we
going down?"

"Not that I know of," he answered with a gayety he did not feel. "But
I'll ask the head steward."

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingers
convulsively. "If I'm never any better, you will always remember this
happy, summer, won't you? Oh, it's been such a happy summer! It has been
one long joy, one continued triumph! But it was too late; we were too
old; and it's broken me."

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would
have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray
inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their
barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence. He
ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, "Don't you
think I'd better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?"

She suddenly turned and faced him. "The doctor! Why, I'm not sick, Basil!
If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something to
stop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyed
window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me."

She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes,
while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed
to open and shut like a weary eye.

"Oh, go away!" she implored. "I shall be better presently, but if you
stand there like that--Go and see if you can't get some other room, where
I needn't feel as if I were drowning, all the way over."

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did
not stop short of the purser's office. He made an excuse of getting
greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he
supposed there would be