"If you would like to see him," he said, "I have no doubt Mr. Brand will let you stand on the gallery for a little while."
She declined, excusing herself on the ground of weakness.
"In this high wind," she said, "it will be very cold out there, and any further exposure would make me very ill."
"That's true enough," he agreed, though he wondered why she raised no question concerning the message she wished him to convey to Mr. Traill.
Had she forgotten the urgency of her words over night? He had carried her instructions quite faithfully to Brand and the latter smiled at the fantasy.
"Time enough to think of such things when we are assured of the lady's departure," he said, and they left it at that.
Thinking to interest her, Pyne told her of the crowd on the Falcon.
"Mostly reporters, Brand thinks," he said. "What a story they will build up in the New York papers. It will be more fun than a box of monkeys to get hold of this week's news and read all the flapdoodle they are printing."
But Mrs. Vansittart was not to be roused from her melancholy. She dreaded the least physical suffering. Privation was a new thing in her life. Today she was inert, timid, a woman who cowered away from the door and was obviously anxious that he should leave her to the quiet misery of the packed bedroom.
As the day passed, a wearisome iteration of all that had gone before, a new feature in the relations of the crowded community made itself disagreeably apparent. Men drew apart from each other, singly, or in small groups. An inconsolable gloom settled on the women. By some means, the knowledge spread that they might all starve to death in the heart of this cold dungeon. They began to loathe it, to upbraid its steadfastness with spoken curses or unrestrained tears. The sanctuary of one day was becoming the tomb of the next. No longer was there competition to look at land or sea from the open windows. Everywhere was settling down a pall of blank, horrible silence and suspicion.