By sunrise next morning the Friedrich Barbarossa was racing through the grey Atlantic with even speed. It was late winter—it was really early spring—and she had already encountered a storm and heavy seas, but the lean ocean express dove through the former and rode the latter as easily as if she had been a railway train running on tried rails along a perfect roadbed. There was no reason in the world why anybody should be sick aboard her; few others were sick; yet, Stainton, on that second day out, remained below.
He could not account for it. He did not like to confess it. He especially hated to confess, when he awoke to see his wife putting the finishing touches to her toilet in the far corner of their big stateroom. But this was manifestly a case where discretion must triumph over valour: he no sooner got to his feet than he got off them again.
"It's no use," he sighed. "I don't know what it was. I wish they didn't have such good dinners on this boat, for it must have been something I ate."
Muriel was all consolation.
"Let me ring for the steward to bring your breakfast here," she said.
"Not if you don't want to kill me! Don't mention food again, please—I wonder if that lobster were just fresh."
She insisted for a long time that she would remain below with him, but he overruled her. He said that the open air would be good for her, even if she did not seem to need it, and he meant that, although he meant also—what he dared not say—that he wanted to struggle alone with his malady. Finally, therefore, Muriel descended to the big dining saloon alone and surprisedly found herself breakfasting with enjoyment, in spite of her husband's absence.
She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters, beating to crests of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely, but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings, oysterplant ménagère, succotash, biscuit japonais and nougat parfait. She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace passengers walked by on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road.
He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy—a boy not five years her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own interested scrutiny and, when they answered it with an honest smile, whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks.
Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim still slept.