“Mr. Crane! Mr. Crane!” cried a woman frantically, beating her hands upon the door. Enoch sprang to his feet, as Joe rushed to open it.
In her wrapper, her gray hair dishevelled, Miss Ann burst into the room.
“Oh, Mr. Crane!” she gasped, staggering toward him, her frail hands clutching at her temples. “Oh, my God! Jane is dying!”
CHAPTER XXI
The Britannic, bound for Liverpool, rose, fell, and plunged on stubbornly, in a wintry head sea.
Enoch lay in his berth, reading. Every little while her bow buried itself under a great wave. Some burst upon her fore-deck, with the boom and vibration of big guns, her bow obliterated under the explosion in a blinding mass of spray.
Heavy-booted sailors clambered back and forth over the ceiling of the plain little stateroom, busily lashing some canvas as a windbreak on the starboard-deck. Below, the woodwork creaked in unison to the lift and roll of the ship. People who had no longer any interest in life rang for the stewards or stewardesses, and groaned while they waited.
None of these sounds, however, disturbed Enoch. He was not only thoroughly comfortable, but supremely happy. It showed in every line of his face, in the quiet twinkle in his eyes. He read on. Now and then his smile widened into a broad grin over a page—pages he knew by heart, and had never yet grown tired of.
“What a wonderful fellow Carroll is,” he declared. “What a subtle artisan in humor!
“‘They were learning to draw,’ the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy, ‘and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with “M”——’