“You must get rather tired of bothering about it,” Fairchild suggested as they descended toward lunch. (There was an offshore breeze and the saloon was screened. And besides, it was near the galley.) “Why don’t you leave it in your stateroom? Major Ayers is pretty trustworthy, I guess.”

“It’ll be all right,” Pete replied. “I’ve got used to it. I’d miss it, see?”

“Yes,” the other agreed. “New one, eh?”

“I’ve had it a while.” Pete removed it and Fairchild remarked its wanton gay band and the heavy plaiting of the straw.

“I like a panama, myself,” he murmured. “A soft hat. . . . This must have cost five or six dollars, didn’t it?”

“Yeh,” Pete agreed, “but I guess I can look out for it.”

“It’s a nice hat,” the Semitic man said. “Not everybody can wear a stiff straw hat. But it rather suits the shape of Pete’s face, don’t you think?”

“Yes, that’s so,” Fairchild agreed. “Pete has a kind of humorless reckless face that a stiff hat just suits. A man with a humorous face should never wear a stiff straw hat. But then, only a humorless man would dare buy one.”

Pete preceded them into the saloon. The man’s intent was kindly, anyway. Funny old bird. Easy. Easy. Somebody’s gutting. Anybody’s. Fairchild spoke to him again with a kind of tactful persistence:

“Look here, here’s a good place to leave it while you eat. You hadn’t seen this place, I reckon. Slip it under here, see? It’ll be safe as a church under here until you want it again. Look, Julius, this place was made for a stiff straw hat, wasn’t it?” This place was a collapsible serving table of two shelves that let shallowly into the bulkhead: it operated by a spring and anything placed on the lower shelf would be inviolate until some one came along and lowered the shelves again.

“It don’t bother me any,” Pete said.

“All right,” the other answered. “But you might as well leave it here: it’s such a grand place to leave a hat. Lots better than the places in theaters. I kind of wish I had a hat to leave there, don’t you, Julius?”

“I can hold it all right,” Pete said again.

“Sure,” agreed Fairchild readily, “but just try it a moment.” Pete did so, and the other two watched with interest. “It just fits, don’t it? Why not leave it there, just for a trial?”

“I guess not. I guess I’ll hold onto it,” Pete decided. He took his hat again and when he had taken his seat he slid it into its usual place between the chairback and himself.

Mrs. Maurier was chanting: “Sit down, people,” in an apologetic, hopeless tone. “You must excuse things. I had hoped to have lunch on deck, but with the wind blowing from the shore . . .”

“They’ve found where we are and that we are good to eat, so it doesn’t make any difference where the wind blows from,” Mrs. Wiseman said, businesslike with her tray.

“And with the steward gone, and things so unsettled,” the hostess resumed in antistrophe, roving her unhappy gaze. “And Mr. Gordon—”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Fairchild said heavily helpful, taking his seat. “He’ll show up all right.”

“Don’t be a fool, Aunt Pat,” the niece added. “What would he want to get drowned for?”

“I’m so unlucky,” Mrs. Maurier moaned, “things—things happen to me, you see,” she explained, haunted with that vision of a pale implacability of water, and sodden pants, and a red beard straying amid the slanting green regions of the sea in a dreadful simulation of life.

“Aw, shucks,” the niece protested, “ugly like he is, and so full of himself. . . . He’s got too many good reasons for getting drowned. It’s the ones that don’t have any excuse for it that get drowned and run down by taxis and things.”

“But you never can tell what people will do.” Mrs. Maurier rejoined, becoming profound through the sheer disintegration of comfortable things. “People will do anything.”

“Well, if he’s drowned, I guess he wanted to be,” the niece said bloodlessly. “He certainly can’t expect us to fool around here waiting for him, anyway. I never heard of anybody fading out without leaving a note of some kind. Did you, Jenny?”

Jenny sat in a soft anticipatory dread. “Did he get drownded?” she asked. “One day at Mandeville, I saw . . .” Into Jenny’s heavenly eyes there welled momentarily a selfless emotion, temporarily pure and clean. Mrs. Wiseman looked at her, compelling her with her eyes. She said:

“Oh, forget about Gordon for a while. If he’s drowned (which I don’t believe) he’s drowned; if he isn’t, he’ll show up again, just as Dawson says.”

“That’s what I say,” the niece supported her quickly. “Only he’d better show up soon, if he wants to go back with us. We’ve got to get back home.”

“You have?” her aunt said with heavy astonished irony. “How are you going, pray?”

“Perhaps her brother will make us a boat with his saw,” Mark Frost suggested.

“That’s an idea,” Fairchild agreed. “Say, Josh, haven’t you got a tool of some sort that’ll get us off again?” The nephew regarded Fairchild solemnly.

“Whittle it off,” he said. “Lend you my knife if you bring it back right away.” He resumed his meal.

“Well, we’ve got to get back,” his sister repeated. “You folks can stay around here if you want to, but me and Josh have got to get back to New Orleans.”

“Going by Mandeville?” Mark Frost asked.

“But the tug should be here at any time,” Mrs. Maurier insisted, reverting again to her hopeless amaze. The niece gave Mark Frost a grave speculative stare.

“You’re smart, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got to be,” Mark Frost answered equably, “or I’d—”

“—have to work, huh? It takes a smart man to sponge off of Aunt Pat, don’t it?”

“Patricia!” her aunt exclaimed.

“Well, we have got to get back. We’ve got to get ready to go up to New Haven next month.”

Her brother came again out of his dream. “We have?” he repeated heavily.

“I’m going, too,” she answered quickly. “Hank said I could.”

“Look here,” her brother said, “are you going to follow me around all your life?”

“I’m going to Yale,” she repeated stubbornly. “Hank said I could go.”

“Hank?” Fairchild repeated, watching the niece with interest.

“It’s what she calls her father,” her aunt explained. “Patricia—”

“Well, you can’t go,” her brother answered violently. “Dam’f I’m going to have you tagging around behind me forever. I can’t move, for you. You ought to be a bill collector.”

“I don’t care: I’m going,” she repeated stubbornly. Her aunt said vainly:

“Theodore!”

“Well, I can’t do anything, for her,” he complained bitterly. “I can’t move, for her. And now she’s talking about going—She worried Hank until he had to say she could go. God knows, I’d ’a’ said that too: I wouldn’t want her around me all the time.”

“Shut your goddam mouth,” his sister told him. Mrs. Maurier chanted “Patricia, Patricia.” “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!”

“What’ll you do up there?” Fairchild asked. The niece whirled, viciously belligerent. Then she said:

“What’d you say?”

“I mean, what’ll you do to pass the time while he’s at classes and things? Are you going to take some work, too?”

“Oh, I’ll just go around with balloon pants. To night clubs and things. I won’t bother him: I won’t hardly see him, he’s such a damn crum.”

“Like hell you will,” her brother interrupted, “you’re not going, I tell you.”

“Yes, I am. Hank said I could go. He said I could. I—”

“Well, you won’t ever see me: I’m not going to have you tagging around after me up there.”

“Are you the only one in the world that’s going up there next year? Are you the only one that’ll be there? I’m not going up there to waste my time hanging around the entrance to Dwight or Osborne hall just to see you. You won’t catch me sitting on the rail of the Green with freshmen. I’ll be going to places that maybe you’ll get into in three years, if you don’t bust out or something. Don’t you worry about me. Who was it,” she rushed on, “got invited up for Prom Week last year, only Hank wouldn’t let me go? Who was it saw the game last fall, while you were perched up on the top row with a bunch of newspaper reporters, in the rain?”

“You didn’t go up for Prom Week.”

“Because Hank wouldn’t let me. But I’ll be there next year, and you can haul out the family sock on it.”

“Oh, shut up for a while,” her brother said wearily. “Maybe some of these ladies want to talk some.”