The ship was deserted, practically; everyone had gone ashore. She went disconsolately towards the stairway. On the bottom step sat Jimmy sobbing dismally.
"There they are!" he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand and pointing to a little boat out on the blue water. "I did so want to go with them."
Mrs. Hetherington in a white frock and blue sash was waving her hand gaily from the little boat. Marcella suddenly felt indignant with her, and took Jimmy's tear-stained hand.
"There they are!" she said, smiling. "And here are we! We're both in the same boat, old man. Come down to my little house. I've something nice there."
She broke off a big bunch of grapes for him and, taking pencils, books and writing-paper, went back on deck. Two Italians were just going off with a stock of postcards. She bought a dozen for Jimmy, and a little basket of strawberries.
"Now you're going to be a big man, Jimmy. We're going right up on the roof of the ship, and you're having a chair all to yourself so that you can write postcards to Gran."
His face cleared immediately, though as they got settled in the shadow of one of the lifeboats and he saw Mrs. Hetherington's white figure walking along the quay he gave a little sigh. She addressed his postcards as far as his remembered stock of addresses would go. Several Aunties who lived "along Gran's street and along the next and over the field" had to be left out. As soon as postcard writing palled a sailor came along providentially, took him to see the hen coops, and let him find two eggs that had been laid.
Marcella wrote long letters home; only to Wullie did she mention Louis, and even to him she said very little.
Noon came, and the boat deck was very hot. The chiming of bells in the churches told when the moment of the Elevation came and passed; the little reports sounded from the old mountain: she thought they sounded like guns that had been fired a thousand years ago. Jimmy said he didn't feel well, and went to sleep after a while; an Italian boy with black, hyacinthine curls and swimming black eyes spied her white frock from his little boat out in the bay: tying up to the accommodation ladder, he stood singing a passionate song to the twanging of a guitar. She wondered whether this were a personal tribute or a way of earning money. The cap he held out for a coin showed it was the one; his eloquent eyes and picturesque gestures as he begged her little withering bunch of vine leaves showed it was the other. She tossed them to him carelessly, and he bowed and kissed them gracefully.
At last the family parties began to come on board, with hot, tired mothers, cross children and disillusioned fathers; then came the emigrant girls, their hats covered in bright flowers. They were hustled below by the third officer, who was superintending the sluicing of the dusty, black decks. As Marcella went slowly below with Jimmy she heard him declaring that coaling was the bane of his existence, as he pointed out to the ship's doctor marks of black hands deliberately printed high up on the shining white paint.