Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles.  Burnamy and Miss Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated to have the voyage over.  They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water.  At Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French fortifications much more on show than the English had been.  Nothing marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought.  The elder couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and, leave the young people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship.  Burnamy was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe.  If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact.  Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an intolerable resignation to the girl’s absence.

“Yes,” said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, “that terrible patience of youth!”

“Patience?  Folly!  Stupidity!  They ought to be together every instant!  Do they suppose that life is full of such chances?  Do they think that fate has nothing to do but—­”

She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, “Hang round and wait on them?”

“Yes!  It’s their one chance in a life-time, probably.”

“Then you’ve quite decided that they’re in love?” He sank comfortably back, and put up his weary legs on the chair’s extension with the conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.

“I’ve decided that they’re intensely interested in each other.”

“Then what more can we ask of them?  And why do you care what they do or don’t do with their chance?  Why do you wish their love well, if it’s that?  Is marriage such a very certain good?”

“It isn’t all that it might be, but it’s all that there is.  What would our lives have been without it?” she retorted.