So now we have the Red Un looking for revenge and in idle moments lurking about the decks where the girl played.  He washed his neck under his collar those days.

And we have the Chief fretting over his engines, subduing drunken stokers, quelling the frequent disturbances of Hell Alley, which led to the firemen’s quarters, eating little and smoking much, devising out of his mental disquietude a hundred possible emergencies and—­keeping away from the passengers.  The Junior Second took down the two parties who came to see the engine room and gave them lemonade when they came up.  The little girl’s mother came with the second party and neither squealed nor asked questions—­only at the door into the stokeholes she stood a moment with dilated eyes.  She was a little woman, still slim, rather tragic.  She laid a hand on the Junior’s arm.

“The—­the engineers do not go in there, do they?”

“Yes, madam.  We stand four-hour watches.  That is the Senior Second Engineer on that pile of cinders.”

The Senior Second was entirely black, except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes.  There was a little trouble in a coalbunker; they had just discovered it.  There would be no visitors after this until the trouble was over.

The girl’s mother said nothing more.  The Junior Second led them around, helping a pretty young woman about and explaining to her.

“This,” he said, smiling at the girl, “is a pump the men have nicknamed Marguerite, because she takes most of one man’s time and is always giving trouble.”

The young woman tossed her head.

“Perhaps she would do better if she were left alone,” she suggested.

The girl’s mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one long look about the engine room.  In some such bedlam of noise and heat he spent his life.  She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the joy of achievement.  The woman saw the engines—­sinister, menacing, frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand—­conquest, victory.  The beat that was uproar to her ears was as the throbbing of his own heart.

It was after they had gone that the Chief emerged from the forward stokehole where the trouble was.  He had not seen her; she would not have known him, probably, had they met face to face.  He was quite black and the light of battle gleamed in his eyes.

They fixed the trouble somehow.  It was fire in a coalbunker, one of the minor exigencies.  Fire requiring air they smothered it one way and another.  It did not spread, but it did not quite die.  And each day’s run was better than the day before.

The weather was good.  The steerage, hanging over the bow, saw far below the undercurling spray, white under dark blue—­the blue growing paler, paler still, until the white drops burst to the top and danced free in the sun.  A Greek, going home to Crete to marry a wife, made all day long tiny boats of coloured paper, weighted with corks, and sailed them down into the sea.