ht. Then the woman took the baby back again, and said
something that Marie-Louise could not understand--but the touch of the
brown hand as it patted gratefully on her arm brought a quick mist to
her eyes, because it was human, a human touch, and out of all the
strangeness around her, out of her loneliness it seemed so priceless a
thing to win.

And then there came harsh, strident commands, and the press around her,
carrying her with it, began to surge forward; and presently she found
herself inside the shed on the pier--and then it was like the deck of
the ship again, for she stood and waited so long and so interminably.
Why did they still have to wait? It could not be here that one must be
examined before one could go out into those streets whose rumble and
noise was louder now! Some one on board, a man who knew a few words of
French, who had made the voyage before, had told her that every one
must be examined; only he had said it was in a vast hall where there
were two big American flags that hung out over it from the gallery, and
that men sat at high desks at the end of long rows of benches, and that
one was towed to it in droll-looking barges that had two decks and were
all closed in like arks. So it could not be here--that place! And
then, more attentive to the details about her, she remembered the
_octroi_ when she had entered Paris from Bernay-sur-Mer. One's things
too must be examined--and she opened her bundle until one of the men
with uniforms should have come and looked at it.

After that, she waited again; and then she was carried forward once
more with the movement of those about her; and, passing out of the
shed, was crowded onto a barge such as the one that the man on the ship
had described to her.

And then here again they waited; for all these people could not get on
one barge, even though it held so many and was so closely packed--and
there were other barges to be filled. She could not see very much, for
she was in the centre of the crowd on the barge's upper deck, and could
only occasionally obtain a glimpse through the little windows that were
in rows on each side--but, at last, she could tell by the motion that
they had started.

There did not seem to be quite so much talking, or chattering, or
confusion now. It was as though, hanging over all these people, had
come a subdued sense of disquiet and trepidation, the sense of some
ordeal to be faced, vaguely grasped, save that it loomed omi