He tried to laugh reassuringly:
“I thought it was to be Jim, not Mister,” he reminded her.
But she only looked at him out of troubled eyes.
In the glare of the pier’s headlights they descended. Passengers were entering the vast, damp enclosure; porters, pier officers, ship’s officers, sailors, passed to and fro as they moved toward the gangway where, in the electric glare of lamps, the clifflike side of the gigantic liner loomed up.
At sight of the monster ship Rue’s heart leaped, quailed, leaped again. As she set one slender foot on the gangway such an indescribable sensation seized her that she caught at Neeland’s arm and held to it, almost faint with the violence of her emotion.
A steward took the suitcase, preceded them down abysmal and gorgeous stairways, through salons, deep into the dimly magnificent bowels of the ocean giant, then through an endless white corridor twinkling with lights, to a stateroom, where a stewardess ushered them in.
There was nobody there; nobody had been there.
“He dare not come,” whispered Neeland in Ruhannah’s ear.
The girl stood in the centre of the stateroom looking silently about her.
“Have you any English and French money?” he asked.