“They hold the boat for us. I feel it’s safe to say that every soul on board this train saving yourself is riding to catch the boat.”

“Hold the Innisfallen at Fishguard Harbor? For how long?”

“If need be till doomsday, but we are generally sailing at midnight.”

“No sir, we’ll never be left helpless in Fishguard, this or any other night,” said the lady in the raincoat.

“Or!” cried the man from Connemara. “Or! We could take the other boat if we’re as late as that, to Rosslare, oh my God! And spend the Sunday bringing ourselves back to Cork!”

“You’re going to Connemara to see your mother,” the young wife said psychically.

“I’m sure as God’s truth staying the one night in Cork first!” he shouted across at her, and banged himself on the knees, as if they were trying to take Cork away from him.

The Welshman asked, “What is the longest on record they have ever held the boat?”

“Who knows?” said the lady in the raincoat. “Maybe ’twill be tonight.”

“Only can I get out now and see where we’ve stopped?” asked Victor.

“Oh my God—we’ve started! Oh that Cork City!”

“When you travel to Cork, do the lot of you generally get seasick?” inquired the Welshman, swaying among them as they got under way.

The lady in the raincoat made him a grand gesture with one hand, and rose and pulled down her suitcase. She opened it and fetched out from beneath the hot water bottle in pink flannel a little pasteboard box.

“What’s that going to be—pills for seasickness?” he said.

She lifted the lid and passed the box under his eyes and then under their eyes, although too fast to be quite offering anything. “’Tis a present,” she said. “A present of seasick pills, given me for the journey.”

The lovers smiled simultaneously, as they would at the thought of any present.

The train stopped again, started; stopped, started. Here on the outer edge of Wales it advanced and hesitated as rhythmically and as interminably as a needle in a hem. The wheels had taken on that defenseless sound peculiar to running near the open sea. Oil lamps burned in their little boxes at the halts; there was a pull at the heart from the feeling of the trees all being bent the same way.

“Now where?” They had stopped again.

A sigh escaped the lovers, who had drawn a breath of the sea. A single lamp stared in at their window, like the eye of a dragon lifted out of the lid of sleep.