It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room, and the problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously solved itself, the spots and ladders not being past cure after all, but—­

“Lies!  Lies!  Lies!” exclaimed the mistress indignantly, as she ran up on to the deck.  “What’s the use of telling me lies?”

In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a child and come cringing to a girl because she wanted to sit where she had not leave to sit, she did not think of the particular case, and, unpacking her music, soon forgot all about the old woman and her sheets.

Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified to flatness within.  The world no longer cared about her, and a ship was not a home.  When the lamps were lit yesterday, and the sailors went tumbling above her head, she had cried; she would cry this evening; she would cry to-morrow.  It was not home.  Meanwhile she arranged her ornaments in the room which she had won too easily.  They were strange ornaments to bring on a sea voyage—­china pugs, tea-sets in miniature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes’ heads in coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny photographs, representing downright workmen in their Sunday best, and women holding white babies.  But there was one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and before she sought it Mrs. Chailey put on her spectacles and read what was written on a slip of paper at the back: 

“This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by Willoughby Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted service.”

Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.

“So long as I can do something for your family,” she was saying, as she hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously in the passage: 

“Mrs. Chailey!  Mrs. Chailey!”

Chailey instantly tidied her dress, composed her face, and opened the door.

“I’m in a fix,” said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and out of breath.  “You know what gentlemen are.  The chairs too high—­the tables too low—­there’s six inches between the floor and the door.  What I want’s a hammer, an old quilt, and have you such a thing as a kitchen table?  Anyhow, between us”—­she now flung open the door of her husband’s sitting room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his forehead all wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

“It’s as though they’d taken pains to torment me!” he cried, stopping dead.  “Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and pneumonia?  Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense.  My dear,” Helen was on her knees under a table, “you are only making yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise the fact that we are condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery.  To come at all was the height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face it like a man.  My diseases of course will be increased—­I feel already worse than I did yesterday, but we’ve only ourselves to thank, and the children happily—­”