Sometimes Hannah West would stand by the lifeboats and gaze out across the Gulf for an hour at a time, while Collis rested himself on a deck chair and drank tall tumblers of dry sherry with ice. At those times, they spoke very little, although Hannah would immediately come out of her reverie if Collis made any move to leave her, and she would smile at him so entreatingly that he would shrug and stay. The days grew hotter, and longer, and in the evenings they sat in the dining-saloon in the red feverish light of heated sunsets, their conversation murmured and polite, as their knives and forks clattered on their plates, as the day died in a flurry of moths and a bitter waft of coffee. At night, Collis would lie on his upper berth, feeling the sea breeze flowing through the open porthole close to his face, listening to the snores of his Latvian cabinmate, as yet another cord of slumbering firewood was sawn up, and he would think about Delphine, and her astonishing sensuality, and then about Hannah’s strange and compelling profile, and her distracted way of talking, and then he would close his eyes and think for a moment about the big dusky breasts of the half-breed girl. He wasn’t at all sure what it was that he felt for Hannah. She wasn’t as blatantly provocative as the half-breed girl, and her sexual manners certainly weren’t as forward as Delphine’s. Yet she had an alluring way of standing, and looking, and talking; and when the wind blew her hair, it was all Collis could do not to reach out and curl its fine blondeness around his fingers. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he wanted very much to possess her, not simply sexually, but in every other way. He wanted to possess her childhood, all those images of cold winters in Wakefield, with the frost on the trees, and the sun dull and sullen behind the colonial houses. He wanted to possess her moments of happiness, the day she had married, the night she had lain in her lace-trimmed nightgown and first felt the heaviness of her husband on top of her, the squeezed-closed eyes, the breathing, the sighs of pleasure or of pain. He wanted to possess her now, on the deck of this steamer in the dark wide warmth of the Gulf of Mexico, to touch her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, her ribboned underwear. More than any other woman he had ever met, he wanted to own her, to be as intimate with her as she was with herself. He wanted her as a mistress and as a friend, but even more than that, he seemed to want her as a means of escaping from his own past and his own memories, by taking on hers instead. She had married a Protestant and was stricken with guilt. She had suffered over her mother’s deathbed. Now, she was uncertain of her love for the man she had sacrificed everything for. To take on this arcane, religious, and romantic guilt in place of his own remorse for Kathleen Mary and the sordid family squabbles that had led him to leave New York would be an intriguing relief. It would make his life mysterious and adventurous instead of cheap and embarrassing; and it would draw him into another world like a man drawn through a secret door. He almost relished the prospect of confronting Walter West, with Hannah swooning in the crook of his arm and declaring, ‘She is mine now! You must set her free!’