As the boat swung away from the pier, a larger steamship of one of the coastwise lines, outward bound from its dock farther up the North River, passed with leeway so scant that the dress and features of those upon its decks were clearly to be discerned. And at the moment when the two vessels were nearest, Joan discovered one who stood just outside an open cabin door, leaning upon the rail with an impressively nonchalant pose, and smoking a heavy cigar. He wore clothing of a conspicuous shepherd's-plaid, and his pose was an arrested dramatic gesture. In a moment a woman emerged from the open door behind him and joined him at the rail, placing an intimate hand on his forearm and saying something which won from him a laugh and a look of tender admiration: a handsome, able-bodied woman, expensively but loudly dressed, her connection with the stage as unquestionable as was his. Joan dissembled the odd emotion with which she recognized the man, and turned to Fowey. "What boat is that, do you know, Hubert?" Fowey raked her with an indifferent glance, fore and aft. "Belongs to the New Bedford Line," he announced--"can't make out her name--connects at New Bedford for the boats to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Ever been up that way?" "No. What's it like?" "Pretty islands. Don't know Martha's Vineyard very well, but Nantucket's my old stamping-ground. Go up there in the middle of the summer--about now--and you'll find every actor and actress you ever heard of, and then some. Great place. Wish we were going there." "Don't be silly...." The boats were drawing apart. Joan looked back for the last sight she was ever to have of her husband. Though she couldn't have known this, she sighed a little, in strange depression. Perplexed, she tried vainly to analyze her emotion: was it regret--or jealousy? Of a sudden, in the heart of that immense crowd, with Fowey attentive at her elbow, she was conscious of a feeling of intense loneliness. XXXV When, after a long and tedious voyage over a sea as flat as a plate and unflawed by a single cooling drift of air, the steamboat was made fast to the end of that long iron pier which juts out from the flat, low coast of Coney Island, its passengers rose en masse and crowded toward the gangways. Joan and Fowey, attempting to hang back until the crowd had thinned out sufficiently to enable them to go ashore in comfort, were caught in the swirl of it and swept along willy-nilly. Once on the pier-head the multitude had more elbow room and spread out, the main body streaming headlong shorewards, keen-set for the delights promised by the two great amusement parks which had grown up in the heart of that frontier settlement of gin-mills, dance-halls, side-shows, eating-houses, and dives unspeakable.