ship till they should reach some distant island. This narrow deck, with its tarry lines between planks, was his only home. Also, in the breeze across the wide harbor he was beastly cold, and in general God help him!
As the St. Buryan was warped out into the river, as Martin was suggesting to his Commission, "How about going downstairs and seeing if we can raise a drink?" there was the sound of a panicky taxicab on the pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure running—but so feebly, so shakily—and they realized that it was Max Gottlieb, peering for them, tentatively raising his thin arm in greeting, not finding them in the line at the rail, and turning sadly away.
As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works, evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat deck.
Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape Hatteras, and tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was cold, and in a ladylike manner she was sick, but she was not at all tired. She insisted on conveying information to him, from the West Indian guide-book which she had earnestly bought.
Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea with the Captain, scouse with the fo'c'sle, and intellectual conferences with the negro missionary in the steerage. He was to be heard—always he was to be heard: singing on the promenade deck, defending Bolshevism against the boatswain, arguing oil-burning with the First Officer, and explaining to the bar steward how to make a gin sling. He held a party for the children in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer a volume of navigation to study between parties.
He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of the St. Buryan, but he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss Gwilliam; he tried to cheer her on a seemingly lonely adventure.
Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her section of New Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a churchwarden, her grandfather had been a solid farmer. That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and she
