He reached up and thrust something into Jimmy’s hand, something crisp and crackling.  Then, his mission performed, fell back and stood waving a snowy handkerchief.  The train plunged into the tunnel.

Jimmy stared at the five-pound note.  He was aware, like Ann farther along the train, of a lump in his throat.  He put the note slowly into his pocket.

The train moved on.

CHAPTER VII

ON THE BOAT-DECK

Rising waters and a fine flying scud that whipped stingingly over the side had driven most of the passengers on the Atlantic to the shelter of their staterooms or to the warm stuffiness of the library.  It was the fifth evening of the voyage.  For five days and four nights the ship had been racing through a placid ocean on her way to Sandy Hook:  but in the early hours of this afternoon the wind had shifted to the north, bringing heavy seas.  Darkness had begun to fall now.  The sky was a sullen black.  The white crests of the rollers gleamed faintly in the dusk, and the wind sang in the ropes.

Jimmy and Ann had had the boat-deck to themselves for half an hour.  Jimmy was a good sailor:  it exhilarated him to fight the wind and to walk a deck that heaved and dipped and shuddered beneath his feet; but he had not expected to have Ann’s company on such an evening.  But she had come out of the saloon entrance, her small face framed in a hood and her slim body shapeless beneath a great cloak, and joined him in his walk.

Jimmy was in a mood of exaltation.  He had passed the last few days in a condition of intermittent melancholy, consequent on the discovery that he was not the only man on board the Atlantic who desired the society of Ann as an alleviation of the tedium of an ocean voyage.  The world, when he embarked on this venture, had consisted so exclusively of Ann and himself that, until the ship was well on its way to Queenstown, he had not conceived the possibility of intrusive males forcing their unwelcome attentions on her.  And it had added bitterness to the bitter awakening that their attentions did not appear to be at all unwelcome.  Almost immediately after breakfast on the very first day, a creature with a small black moustache and shining teeth had descended upon Ann and, vocal with surprise and pleasure at meeting her again—­he claimed, damn him!, to have met her before at Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, and a dozen other places—­had carried her off to play an idiotic game known as shuffle-board.  Nor was this an isolated case.  It began to be borne in upon Jimmy that Ann, whom he had looked upon purely in the light of an Eve playing opposite his Adam in an exclusive Garden of Eden, was an extremely well-known and popular character.  The clerk at the shipping-office had lied absurdly when he had said that very few people were crossing on the Atlantic this voyage.  The vessel was crammed till its sides bulged, it was