No traveler out of that compartment was, actually, booked for a berth on the Innisfallen except the lady in the raincoat, who marched straight off. Most third-class train passengers spent the night third-class in the Innisfallen lounge. The man from Connemara was the first one stretched, a starfish of exhaustion, on a cretonne-covered couch. The American girl stared at a page of her book, then closed it until they were under way. The lovers disappeared. In the deeps of night that bright room reached some vortex of quiet, like a room where all brains are at work and great decisions are on the brink. Occasionally there was a tapping, as of drumming fingernails—that meant to closed or hypnotized eyes that dogs were being sped through. The random, gentle old men who were walking the corridors in their tweeds and seemed lost as Jesus’s lambs, were waiting perhaps for the bar to open. The young wife, as desperate as she’d feared, saw nothing, forgot everything, and even abandoned Victor, as if there could never be any time or place in the world but this of her suffering. She spoke to the child as if she had never seen him before and would never see him again. Victor took the last little paper of biscuits she had given him away to a corner and slowly emptied it, making a mountain of the crumbs; then he bent his head over his travel card with its new stamp, on which presently he rolled his cheek and floated unconscious.

Once the man from Connemara sat up out of his sleep and stared at the American girl pinned to her chair across the room, as if he saw somebody desperate who had left her husband once, endangered herself among strangers, been turned back, and was here for the second go-round, asking again for a place to stay in Cork. She stared back motionless, until he was a starfish again.

Then it was morning—a world of sky coursing above, streaming light. The Innisfallen had entered the Lee. Almost at arm’s reach were the buff, pink, gray, salmon fronts of houses, trees shining like bird wings, and bells that jumped toward sound as the ship, all silent, flowed past. The Sunday, the hour, too, were encroaching-real. Each lawn had a flag-like purity that braved and invited all the morning senses, even smell, as snow can—as if snow had fallen in the night, and this sun and this ship had come to trace it and melt it.

It was that passing, short, yet inviolate distance between ship and land on both sides that made an arrow-like question in the heart. Someone cried at random, “What town is this?” Any of them should have known, but the senses waked back home can fill too full, until black lines and framework vanish like names, leaving only shapes of light and color without knowledge or memory to inform them.