“Who does?” he appealed to Hildegarde. “I don’t know.” “Yes, I heard a woman yesterday—” “Oh, that awful Miss Pinckney, you know, with the draggled feathers!” “Well, go and find her and get her to sing now.” “_Sing?_” “Yes, sing. It may make just all the difference.” Cheviot was in the act of bolting back to the captain. “She can’t sing.” Hildegarde followed him a step. He misunderstood it for an untimely musical criticism. “Then let her make a noise of some sort.” “Oh, she’s doing that—screaming with hysterics down in the saloon.” Cheviot flashed back to say confidentially, not to Hildegarde, but to Mrs. Locke: “Go and see if you can’t get up a concert.” With which cool and apparently crazy suggestion he vanished. Twenty minutes later a woman, wearing diamond ear-rings and a sealskin jacket, paused in her flight up the companionway and leaned an instant, panting, against the music-room door. Now she was lifting her head with a slow incredulity, as an unsteady voice near by began to quaver out a rag-time ballad, highly offensive to sensitive ears, but a tune familiar and to many on the ship most dear. The woman peered round the half-open door, staring from one to the other of those callous creatures within, making merry on the brink of destruction—Miss Mar at the piano, and at her side the draggled Miss Pinckney. Ah, no, that red-eyed woman wasn’t callous. She sang the inane words with lips that trembled. Now she was breaking down. “No, no. Go on,” Miss Mar insisted. “Think of the others.” “They’ll never listen. Everybody’s too—too—” “Well, let’s see. Now!” and very ineffectually Hildegarde took up the second verse. Miss Pinckney plucked the strain away as two men looked in. There was nothing especial to take them up or down. They stood near the woman with the diamond ear-rings, hardly knowing that they listened. In that first twenty minutes, every time the ice struck the ship, Miss Pinckney would hesitate and her voice would fly off the scale in a faint scream. “Oh, _please_! That’s enough to scare anybody!” and Hildegarde played doggedly on. “Now, let’s try again!” It was, however, as if not Miss Mar’s admonishing, but the rude insistence of the tune dragged Miss Pinckney along, pulling her out of the pit of her fears and landing her “Down along the Bowery,” or “In Gay Paree,” or some place equally remote from the sand-bar in the Bering Sea. Mrs. Locke, with the Blumpittys and a brace of doctors in tow, appeared in the act of descending for a muster of “the company.” Cheviot came flying down behind them, two steps at a time. He was about to turn in at the music-room, when a woman pushed past him, showing a panic-stricken face above the sleeping child that she carried clutched tight against her breast. A sudden jar made the sleeper lift a cropped head and look about with wide eyes.