Mrs. Alphen, from her deck-chair, would call at him brightly, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, being so selfish and neglecting us ladies and all!’ and she would gesture at the deck-chair beside her, but he would only smile and scuttle away, realizing that he was asocial and a scoundrel.

Hour-long, as the ship rolled, he watched the forward derrick sway against the seas rushing at him. In the power of the waves he felt freedom; in the bows, tenderly swelling to a piercing point, he felt speed; and in the pendulum of the derrick, a rhythm of security . . . Perhaps in wandering he could be minutely great, as in room-bound labour he had, these years, been greatly small.

Toward the end of the passage, Hazel spoke of home and of Howard and Sara barely once a day, as if merely by habit. Her homesickness, and his, was acute only at Christmas, which they spent on the Aranjuna Queen in the English Channel, with a dim sight of Margate and the mouth of the Thames.

‘B-but anyway, we aren’t any homesicker than the others, I guess!’ she sobbed gallantly.

Indeed, the more the Aranjuna’s passengers tried to be festive and bear in the garlands and the Yule log, the more veiled and timid were their eyes. They had a Christmas tree in the lounge, and the captain swore it was a damn fine tree, for hadn’t he brought it himself from Mount Vernon? The head steward rather mechanically produced silver cord and crimson glass balls, and rather mechanically the passengers dressed the tree. They cleared out the cubbyhole which was the ‘souvenir shop’ of the barber-bath-steward, and gave one another souvenir handkerchiefs and tin toy automobiles and ten-cent boxes of candy; they had a large dinner, with goose and turkey and anguished paper hats, and afterwards they danced.

But every time Miss Pablum danced awkwardly past the tree, she looked away. Her mother had died on the first of December.

In mid afternoon they had their Christmas radiogram:

MERRY XMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR EXQUISITE EASTER MUCH LOVE DONT FORGET LOVING KIDS SARA HOWARD ANNABEL LILNERO

Then Hazel wept, and watered the sacred rose of Christmas.

‘They’re grand children. They’ll be perfect, now they see they can’t run over us!’ swore Fred. ‘Say! Do you still feel you want to go right back, soon as we land in Hull — just take couple days in London, maybe, and then sail . . .’

Hazel was judicious:

‘Well, now we’re here, seems to me it ‘d be an awful waste of good money not to take advantage of it. Katie Alphen says we’ll just love the Riviera. But we certainly won’t want to stay long . . . Look, Fred. If we just happened to still be here next summer, just happened to decide to stay on, I mean, do you think we’d enjoy having a country cottage in England? Minnie Pablum says we’d adore Rural England . . . Not that she’s been there.’