whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat cutting up roots with a
penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts of the ship: Ridley at
his Greek--he had never found quarters more to his liking; Willoughby at
his documents, for he used a voyage to work of arrears of business; and
Rachel--Helen, between her sentences of philosophy, wondered sometimes
what Rachel _did_ do with herself? She meant vaguely to go and see. They
had scarcely spoken two words to each other since that first evening;
they were polite when they met, but there had been no confidence of any
kind. Rachel seemed to get on very well with her father--much better,
Helen thought, than she ought to--and was as ready to let Helen alone as
Helen was to let her alone.

At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.
When the ship was full this apartment bore some magnificent title and
was the resort of elderly sea-sick ladies who left the deck to their
youngsters. By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor,
Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit for hours playing
very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little English when
the mood took her, and doing--as at this moment--absolutely nothing.

The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence, was
of course partly the reason of it, for she had been educated as the
majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century
were educated. Kindly doctors and gentle old professors had taught her
the rudiments of about ten different branches of knowledge, but they
would as soon have forced her to go through one piece of drudgery
thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were dirty. The
one hour or the two hours weekly passed very pleasantly, partly owing
to the other pupils, partly to the fact that the window looked upon
the back of a shop, where figures appeared against the red windows in