inflaming men’s blood.  Marcella was in a state of puzzlement.  She was puzzled at herself, puzzled at Louis, puzzled at the people round her.  Men went about barefoot in pyjamas, women in muslin nightdresses all day after Suez; in the Indian Ocean, one blazing day, they ran into the tail of a monsoon; the lower decks were swamped and the steerage passengers were sent on to the upper decks, where Marcella and Louis sat surrounded by half a dozen forlorn children whose parents had succumbed to the pitching of the ship and the heat.  Great walls of green, unfoaming water rose sullenly and menacingly higher than the ship, which tossed like a weightless cork; seas came aboard with an effect of silence; down in the saloon glasses, crockery and cutlery crashed to the deck with a momentary fracture of the deadly quiet which seemed all the more silent afterwards:  occasionally a child screamed in fright and was hushed by an almost voiceless mother, while stewards went about with trays of iced drinks, slipping to the deck in a dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately.  Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws.  Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried and stuffed them and sold them afterwards to the passengers.  To Marcella everything seemed cruel and mad and preying.  The passengers were cruel—­to each other and to the stewards; one day, going into the saloon by chance, she found Knollys leaning over a table looking white and sick, as he tried to polish spoons and forks.

“Are you ill?” she asked him.

“There’s only two of us—­including me—­that haven’t crocked up,” he said; “people don’t seem to think it’s hot for us, or that we feel fed up at all.  That Mrs. Hetherington seems to think I’m a private sort of lady’s maid to her alone.  All these women do—­sitting about in deck chairs calling ‘Steward’ all day long!  In the third class alone there’s six stewards in hospital!  And only yesterday I caught it from the Chief because the cutlery hadn’t been polished—­not that that’s my job at all, really—­”

The next moment Knollys fell over in a dead faint, and copying what she had seen him do when passengers fainted, Marcella fetched a pillow from her cabin, laid it under his back on the floor and left him while she polished the cutlery.  Louis found her there and they came near to fighting about it.

“What on earth are you doing?” he asked in amazement.

“Poor Knollys has gone down,” she said, thinking that adequate explanation.