“Oh,” said Dolly, “yours is a horrid berth, come up here, Phyl, there are the loveliest, wonderfullest things to see.”
Then Phyl remembered they were at last, after all [125] ]the weeks and weeks of anticipation and waiting, actually at sea, and was amazed to think that she could have been unwilling to wake. In a twinkling she flung back the clothes, and climbed the mahogany ladder that reached to Dolly’s berth.
The two rough golden heads come very close together as they peep out of the port-hole. “The loveliest, wonderfullest things” were one moment the middle of the grey-green waves, and the next a glimpse of grey rain.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Dolly said, rapturously.
Phyl’s only but perfectly satisfactory answer was a deep-drawn sigh of intense happiness.
“What woke me,” whispered Dolly, “was, I felt somebody’s arm stretched across me, and it was the thin steward that gave Weenie the crystallized fruit, and he just screwed up the window and walked out again.”
“He should have sent the stewardess in,” said Phyl, with a becoming sense of propriety. “I wonder why he shut it; last night they said we might leave it open.”
“P’waps we’re in deeper water now,” suggested Dolly.
The whispering had not wakened either the mother or Weenie. There was a berth just above Mrs. Conway’s, but it had not been disturbed; Weenie was a prey to queer tremors of fear that first strange night, so Mrs. Conway slept with her in her arms. The dear [126] ]dark head was cuddled close up to the mother’s shoulder, the dark eyelashes lay peacefully on the round cheeks, the red babyish lips were apart. The mother was fast asleep, one protecting arm round her youngest daughter.
“They won’t wake for long enough and long enough,” said Dolly; “let’s get dressed and have a peep outside.”