They were all getting themselves ready for the fray or the play of the coming winter; but there seemed nothing joyous in the preparation.  There were many young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there were not many young men, and such as there were kept to the smoking-room.  There was no sign of flirtation among them; he would have given much for a moment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she could have brightened those gloomy surfaces with her impartial lamp.  March wished that he could have brought some report from the outer world to cheer his wife, as he descended to their state-room.  They had taken what they could get at the eleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in the Norumbia.  It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room.  It was on the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there had been any sun it could not have got into their window, which was half the time under water.  The green waves, laced with foam, hissed as they ran across the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned like the wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, and looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he was going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, “Are we going down?”

“Not that I know of,” he answered with a gayety he did not feel.  “But I’ll ask the head steward.”

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingers convulsively.  “If I’m never any better, you will always remember this happy, summer, won’t you?  Oh, it’s been such a happy summer!  It has been one long joy, one continued triumph!  But it was too late; we were too old; and it’s broken me.”

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence.  He ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, “Don’t you think I’d better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?”

She suddenly turned and faced him.  “The doctor!  Why, I’m not sick, Basil!  If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something to stop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyed window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me.”

She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed to open and shut like a weary eye.

“Oh, go away!” she implored.  “I shall be better presently, but if you stand there like that—­Go and see if you can’t get some other room, where I needn’t feel as if I were drowning, all the way over.”