The group on the promenade deck consisted of a lady and gentleman, and a boy of seven. The elders walked rapidly; holding themselves stiffly erect, and showing no sign of acquaintance with anyone on board. The child dragged himself wearily along behind them, looking sometimes from side to side at the various people passing by, with eyes no less furtive than his mother's. She was a tall and handsome woman, with extravagantly marine clothes and much false hair. Her companion, a bulky and ill-favoured man, glanced superciliously at the ladies in the deck chairs, bestowing always a more attentive scrutiny than usual on a very pretty girl, who was lying reading midway down, with a white lace scarf draped round her beautiful hair and the harmonious oval of her face. Daphne, watching him, remembered that she had see him speaking to the girl--who was travelling alone--on one or two occasions. For the rest, they were a notorious couple. The woman had been twice divorced, after misdoings which had richly furnished the newspapers; the man belonged to a financial class with which reputable men of business associate no more than they are obliged. The ship left them severely alone; and they retaliated by a manner clearly meant to say that they didn't care a brass farthing for the ship. The group on the steerage deck was of a very different kind. It was made up of a consumptive wife, a young husband and one or two children. The wife's malady, recently declared, had led to their being refused admission to the States. They had been turned back from the emigrant station on Ellis Island, and were now sadly returning to Liverpool. But the courage of the young and sweet-faced mother, the devotion of her Irish husband, the charm of her dark-eyed children, had roused much feeling in an idle ship, ready for emotion. There had been a collection for them among the passengers; a Liverpool shipowner, in the first class, had promised work to the young man on landing; the mother was to be sent to a sanatorium; the children cared for during her absence. The family made a kind of nucleus round which whatever humanity--or whatever imitation of it--there was on board might gather and crystallize. There were other mournful cases indeed to be studied on the steerage deck, but none in which misfortune was so attractive.