She went out again; it was very seldom she told where she was going. Mrs. Royer was gossiping somewhere and Flo went up to pack. Mrs. Howell had given them a travelling bass, one half of which went over the other half in the same way as a soap container does. The halves did not fit tightly, so that clothes could be stacked right up out of the lower portion and the upper half became a very deep lid. It should have been strapped, only Mrs. Howell had kept the straps thinking that they might still be useful, and Flo was going to have to manage with old rope. It was rather a relief after her many visits to be left alone to pack, because she wanted to decide carefully about things. She had begun to realize that it might be a year before she came back. All the things that she knew she wanted and all the things that she might take were put on the bed. Into the bottom of the bass at once went the spare new underclothes. The choice of other clothes was difficult, not because there were so many to choose among, but because by contrast she saw how shabby the other things were. Most of them were Ivy’s cast-offs, Ivy always having been in work of some sort, while Flo had only had one job since school, three months of office cleaning for the Thistle Trust Limited. Then even more difficult were decisions over intrinsically worthless possessions, which nevertheless were to Flo most valuable. A hand-mirror encrusted with queer shells that her mother had brought from Morecambe from a Mothers’ Meeting trip had as a rival a rounder mirror in which she could see herself much better, but which had only a plain wood back. The Bible which she knew that she ought to take got left behind because she felt that “Sir Gibbie” and “Peg o’ my Heart” would really be better company. A photograph taken at the age of three went into the bass, while another more recent which showed Ivy as well was thrown out because Flo considered that Ivy looked more intelligent on it than herself. Into the bass, too, went a blood-streaked pebble, somewhat resembling a heart, found at Walney Island on the same day that she picked up a sixpenny bit. Afterwards she had carried the stone everywhere for three weeks hoping that it would give more luck, though it hadn’t. Now, however, she felt that she ought to try it again. She had an uneasy fear that even if it didn’t give good luck, it might, if left behind, cause bad luck. Beside the stone went a green glass pig half an inch long with three legs and no tail. This pig had a mate with only two legs and no tail, but after considerable thought that one she left to look after her mother. Last of all, in preference to a morocco pocket-wallet of her father’s, a pair of opera glasses of his went into the bass. They were plain, and had never been in a theatre, though the black enamel had been worn off the yellow metal of the frames of the lenses, and one of the barrels was rust-pitted from much use in all weathers. Flo remembered how her father had always carried them in his left trouser pocket, and how he had brought them out and let her toy with them very occasionally when she was very young. But he had always been so careful to see that they did not get dropped that the whole family had grown up with the impression that they were valuable; and when he died suddenly of pneumonia in the late spring when Flo was six, the glasses had been carefully put away in the polished walnut box which was one of Milly Royer’s few maidenhood treasures. Flo, of course, had not known this, but one day in the last year of her schooling, she had been attracted by the round eye of mother-of-pearl let into the box lid and had found the glasses and had taken them out. By that time her mother had grown careless, and when she saw her with them she merely tried to recall where they had been put, and then forgot them again. But Flo had remembered how her father once had taken her to Walney and let her look at a yacht far out, with the sun on its white sails. On deck there had been a woman in a poppy jumper, and the sun had enriched her hair to gold; and Flo, seeing all this with unexpected intimacy, in the enclosed field of the lenses, had suddenly felt a romantic thrill. How lucky the woman was, how good it must be to be out there, she thought, and then knew envy. The picture was in her memory never to be forgotten, and how often she had prayed to be able to have a husband who would give her a yacht like that, or how many times she had day-dreamed of herself on a yacht, she could not have told. As she handled the glasses now, the thought strayed into her mind that the way the youth had been lying on the deck of the unfinished submarine was exactly how she would lie on the deck of “her” yacht. She laughed lightly at that, and put the glasses in without hesitation. She had been told that her father had wasted a lot of time uselessly staring through the glasses at ships when he might have been working, but what did that matter? She thought that it was a good thing to have done.