There, he was looking at her again. But whether he looked or listened, or stood brooding, his face kept still all the time, still and sad. His mouth hardly moved as he spoke to Gwinnie.
She turned from him to the contemplation of their fellow passengers. The two Belgian boy scouts in capes and tilted caps with tassels bobbing over their foreheads; they tramped the decks, seizing attention by their gay, excited gestures. You could see that they were happy.
The group, close by her in the stern, establishing itself there apart, with an air of righteous possession: five, six, seven men, three young, four middle-aged, rather shy and awkward, on its fringe. In its centre two women in slender tailor-made suits and motor veils, looking like bored uninterested travellers used to the adventure.
They were talking to a little man in shabby tweeds and an olive-green velvet hat too small for his head. His smooth, innocent pink face carried its moustache like an accident, a mistake. Once, when he turned, she met the arched stare of small china-blue eyes; it passed over her without seeing, cold, dreamy, indifferent.
She glanced again at his women. The tall one drew you every time by her raking eyes, her handsome, arrogant face, the gesture of her small head, alert and at the same time set, the predatory poise of an enormous bird. But the other one was--rather charming. Her features had a curious, sweet bluntness; her eyes were decorations, deep-set blue in the flushed gold of her sunburn. The little man straddled as he talked to them, bobbing forward now and then, with a queer jerking movement from his hips.
She wondered what they were and decided that they were part of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, bound for Ostend.
All those people had the look that John had, of having found what they had wanted, of being satisfied, appeased. Even Sutton had it, lying on the top of his sadness, like a light. They felt precisely as she was feeling--all those people.
And through her wonder she remained aware of John Conway as he walked the deck, passing and passing in front of her.
She got up and walked with him.
The two women stared at them as they passed. One, the tall one, whispered something to the other.
"John--do my knees show awfully as I walk?"
"No. Of course they don't. Gwinnie's do. She doesn't know what to do with them."
He looked down at her and smiled.
"I like you. I like you in that cap. You look as if you were sailing fast against a head wind, as if you could cut through anything."