There were moments when, too chilled to sit still, worn out with tramping up and down, wet, and yet more miserable by reason of certain sights and sounds, she, nevertheless, rather than face the greater horror below, would stay on deck all day, wondering a little sometimes that she could suffer so much acute physical misery and yet not rue her coming. For even now, the moment she envisaged a possible escape—a passing yacht that should take her luxuriously home, or any pleasant miracle of rescue—she discovered that come what would, she was not only bound to keep on, but as determined to see it through as she had been that night of Louis’s return, when, innocent of most that it implied, she had said she would go and bring her father home. In the carrying out of her resolution there was nothing, as yet, to be afraid of in the sense she vaguely had supposed her brothers and Louis Cheviot to mean, but of sheer physical wretchedness and soul-sickness, enough and to spare for the chastening of any spirit. There had been a good deal of heavy drinking in the last day or two. As for Curlyhead’s father, he seemed never to be sober, and yet he had wits enough left, as well as cash, to bear a hand in endless games of poker. At first there had been little card-playing. But now, as people began to grow used to the motion, they crawled out of their berths to look at the world from the upper-deck, shiver and go below. Down there, what was there to do but the one thing? If you played once, you played every day, and all day, and more than half the night. People who couldn’t as yet sit at the table to eat, sat there between meals breakfasting, dining, supping off “chips” and bits of pasteboard—not missing fleshpots, since always a jackpot graced the board. There were those who grudged the meal hours. Glowering upon the people who used the tables for mere eating, they stood about impatient till a place was cleared and the real business of poker might begin. The same thing went on straight through the ship. According to the giant, they were as hard at it in the second-class as they were in the first, and on down as far as the horrible berths went, wherever men could get a board or a barrel-head, there they were with cards in their hands. Not men only. And not only the woman with the sealskin jacket and the diamond ear-rings (did she sleep as well as eat and play in these adornments?); other women, too, sat at the absorbing game. “Are they really gambling?” Hildegarde had asked the giant, the first time he found her in a group looking on. The giant had laughed and said, “Don’t they look it?” “No. They are so—so quiet.” “That’s when they’re plunging worst.” “You mean they’re making large sums of money here now, and take it like that?” “Yes, and losing, too, and take it just the same. It’s only in books that gamblers gurgle and gasp.”