The face, with the scarf wound round it, was like a mask. Lines, features, the pale brune coloring, were there; but where was Nan?
A second cheer had gone up from the docks as the Clonmel made fast. The crowd surged forward, shouting questions about the fate of certain Liverpool stokers and seamen. The police intervened, and opened a lane as the first passengers came down the gangway, hatless, unshaven, in borrowed clothes. Women in the crowd below, crying out names, questions, had to be held back by main force. "Let the passengers land first!" And still the cries went up, one sharper than all the rest: "Is Jimmy O'Brian saved?"
The pressure was relieved about the gangway when Nan, one of the last to land, had reached the wharf. She stood with those vacant eyes of hers on Gavan's crutch instead of on his face.
"You—wounded!"
He had not shaped the words, "Where's Julian?" and yet she answered him. "Julian is dead. The rescue people buried him—at sea."
Napier tried ineffectually enough to shield her from a man with a note-book, volleying questions.
While Napier and his man, with the girl between them, slowly made their way through the throng, Napier told her she must take over the rooms he had engaged.
"You won't be able to travel for a day or two," he said.
She stopped short at that, and began to look about with those unseeing eyes. She was "quite able to travel." She "must travel." She was going to Scotland.
A chill gripped Gavan's heart. Was she delirious?