The Cruise of the Violetta

CAPTAIN JANSEN met us at the gangway. There were some changes in the look of the _Violetta_'s deck since last I had seen it, a year and a half before, in the West Indies. The awning was new. Those geranium pots were gone, which used to stand along the scuppers, and be carried down every night and whenever the weather threatened. The world had been too much for them. The same doilies were on the same rocking chairs. There was the brown mahogany parlour table. But among objects that recalled home conventions, something that breathed eastward, a tropic touch here and there, had been admitted. A huge Burmese tapestry swung from one side of the awning, and the breeze bayed it in, its green embroidered serpents writhing lazily above an honest but uninspiring sofa from Grand Rapids. Yellow Chinese mats from Singapore were on the deck in place of the former flowered carpet.

Mrs. Ulswater sat in her familiar rocking chair, small, thin, quiet, and slightly precise; and on one of the mats, with her back against Mrs. Ulswater's chair, sat a girl in a white dress, with dark hair, with very definite eyebrows and a tilted, provocative nose. In front of her, on another mat, sat Chepa smoking a cigarette. At some distance off, a motionless figure in dingy white crouched in the shadow of the cabin, whom I took to be Ram Nad engaged in abstraction. These were the occupants of the after-deck.