A steward came up the deck, carrying rugs and a book for the woman who had occupied the chair next to Ariel’s during the two days’ voyage. Two children with their nurse trailed behind. Ariel’s glance barely touched the group and returned to New York’s terraced, dream-world sky line. But she was glad that these people had come up on deck and would be near her during the little while left of ship life. It did not matter that they would remain unaware of her until the very end. It was more interesting, being interested in them, than having them interested in her. And there was no reason on earth why they should be interested in her. It never entered Ariel’s head that there was. Joan Nevin, the woman, was tall, copper haired and eyelashed, and graceful with a lithe, body-conscious kind of gracefulness, of fashion, perhaps, more than of nature. Her sleek fur coat, her high-heeled, elegant pumps—even the close dark hat, flaring back from her copper eyebrows—these seemed to motivate her gait and her postures. She was, perhaps, more pliable to them than they to her. But Ariel did not mind this, although she realized it. It was wonderful, in its way, fascinating by strangeness. To tell the truth, Mrs. Nevin interested her more at the moment than the unknown, beautiful harbor at which she appeared to be gazing. And no aching longing for her father’s sharing of this interest could turn it dreamlike, for her father could never share it, alive or dead. Fashionable women, even at a distance, bored him. But how did a woman like that feel, Ariel wondered, about her so finished and catered-to beauty, and her easy self-sufficiency? And how did it feel to have two burnished, curled children that were one’s very own, to love, to live for, to play with? How wonderful if Ariel herself had had children of her own to play with and dance with on their beach, while her father was alive and she could still have gloried in them, before the sense of unreality had settled like a thin dust over unshared happiness! The Nevins and the nurse had come the length of the deck now, and were standing near her, but not taking their chairs, and oddly silent. Still, she would not look directly at them to discover the reason. If she looked into their faces she might become visible to them. So far, these two past days, Ariel had kept herself wrapped in a cloud of invisibility, she felt, merely by not meeting other eyes. She was shy of contacts, ever since her father’s death; and the aching, hurting suspense at the back of her mind, which was caused by dread of the near approaching meeting with her father’s friend, had only intensified her desire for invisibility.