"Mine is Number 9 so we are not very far away."

She looked round several times for Louis Farne, wondering if he would
consider it beneath his dignity to have his meals with the steerage
people, but could not see him. Even after she and Jimmy had explored her
cabin, eaten some cake and walked several times up and down the deck
talking, while the wind blew keenly in their faces, she saw nothing of
him and there was dead silence in his cabin. Her deck-chair, she
noticed, was where she had seen it put among a pile of others; later in
the day Knollys came along and stencilled her initials.

"If you don't have your name on, some of these blooming emigrants will
pinch it, or the deck-hands will hide it till we're a few days out and
sell it to someone else."

She began to think Knollys was a very useful person to know, for all his
superiority and pessimism.

As it grew dark, lights twinkled out ashore--lights rocked here and
there on passing ships and barges: tubes of light projected themselves
out from the portholes on to the blackening water, that swished and
washed past the sides with a sound of desolation; to the landward an
uncoiled serpent glittered out into the water and then seemed to cover
itself in a grey veil of darkness as the _Oriana_ passed the pier of
some little watering-place. Marcella went slowly along the deck, climbed
the fo'c'sle steps and sat down on the anchor. At Lashnagar she had
always seen ghosts walking on the sea at nightfall. Now they rose out of
the swirling water, passed in and out swaying among the lights of the
ship. From under her feet in the crew's quarters came the tinkle of a