Page:The Great Secret.djvu/42

26 Botticelli's and shudder at the cleanness and subtilty of those railway lines, or the exquisite sweep of an ironclad ocean packet.

Through the Bay of Biscay they had glided when it raged its fiercest, while the vessel hardly quivered. The passengers saw other three-masted ships bob up and down, and the sight of those madly-tossed vessels made some of the timid ones fancy they were going to be sea-sick, but they could not keep up the notion, for they were as steady as if they had watched the tempest from a granite built pier, only for the heart-like throbbing of that underground machinery, which beat in unison with their ever-throbbing pulses. Then came the balmy summer as they slid along the Spanish coast, when the clean decks invited all to lounge and dream.

Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said and Suez passed before them like the gay scenes of a panorama being unrolled. They had now become accustomed to the beating of that mighty protecting heart, so that when it stopped at these ports of call they seemed to have missed the breathing of a friend, and longed to hear it begin again. They felt gay while the heart beat, and almost desolate when it stopped, for many were making friends, and this made them think about the final stopping, when they would have to part and separate.

They were one family now, isolated from the rest of the world, and, like the insects whose existence terminates within the hour, they were disposed to live fast. Friendship was not an affair of slow growth, it blossomed and ripened rapidly. Sentiment burst forth at a touch or a glance, and situations which might have seemed ridiculous on shore, appeared only natural here, where the seasons changed like magic.

Before this vague scare had come to frighten the