The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores, while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.  A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying down the promenade from the steerage.  “Capitan!  Capitan!  There is a woman!” he shouted in nondescript English.  “She must go hout!  She must go hout!” Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship’s command and seemed to penetrate to the ship’s heart; she stopped, as if with a sort of majestic relenting.  A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved seaward again.

“What is it?  Oh, what is it?” his wife demanded of March’s share of their common ignorance.  A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some friends on board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, “What a charming face he had!” even before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have escaped danger.  She would not hear any excuse for her.  “Her children oughtn’t to have been out of her mind for an instant.”

“Don’t you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?” March asked.

She started from him.  “Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?”

In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot’s letters she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times reiterated.  She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of the mail decided.

“I shouldn’t have forgiven myself,” March said, “if we hadn’t let Tom know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well.”

“It’s to Bella, too,” she reasoned.

He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar things when he came with their daughter’s steamer letter and the flowers and fruit she had sent.  She said, Very well, they would all keep, and went on with her unpacking.  He asked her if she did not think these home things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way she should certainly go back on the pilot-boat.  He perceived that her nerves were spent.  He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about the life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn, wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer down their corridor.