She found the sun deck surprisingly clear of passengers. The deck chairs there had been almost all gathered up and were now being stacked into corners to wait for the return voyage and new voyagers. Ariel crossed to the rail and began to search, eyes narrowed against the cold sunlight glinting from cold waves, for her father’s friend in the dark mass at the edge of the pier over there, which only now was beginning to show itself as separate individuals waiting for the docking of the _Bermuda_. “When I care so much that just a stranger scorns me and finds me in the way, how am I going to help caring terribly if the Weymans don’t like me?” she asked herself, baffled that by no act of will could she slow the beating of her excited heart or cool the fire she felt in her cheeks. “Hugh’s so tall I must soon make him out, if he’s really come to meet me. I’ll wave when he catches sight of me.... Forget myself.... Wave for Father.... Pretend it’s Father seeing Hugh after all these years, and not I. _I will not be strange and shy._” She imagined her father in her place, leaning on the rail,—blond, blue-eyed, chuckling softly and searching with anticipatory eagerness for the high-held dark head of his friend which would stand out any minute now above the crowd of people. And Gregory Clare was so living, so vibrant with life and joy in life, that when the people on the pier, looking up, first caught sight of him, not a soul of them but would ask himself “Who’s that rather wonderful-looking person?” and an involuntary light, a contagion of life, would ripple answeringly in the lifted faces. The wind whipped a strand of Ariel’s hair smartingly across her eyes. She shut them against the pain for an instant, and when she opened them again her father had gone. She was alone. She was only herself now, shy, trivial, pale,—a worm that wondered about the impression she was going to make on her father’s friend and his family. And all the time there was New York’s sky line to glory in.