"No need to frog-march me, Doctor." She habitually spoke in a low-pitched quiet voice. "Enough is enough and I was coming in anyway."

"Why were you out there in the first place?"

"Can't doctors always tell?" She touched the middle button of her black leather coat and from this I understood that her internal economy wasn't taking too kindly to the roller-coaster antics of the Morning Rose. But I also understood that even had the sea been mirror-smooth she'd still have been out on that freezing upper deck: she didn't talk much to the others nor the others to her.

She pushed the tangled hair back from her face and I could see she was very pale and the skin beneath the brown eyes tinged with the beginnings of exhaustion. In her high cheekboned Slavonic way-she was a Latvian but, I supposed, no less a Slav for that-she was very lovely, a fact that was freely admitted and slightingly commented upon as being her only asset: her last two pictures-her only two pictures-were said to have been disasters of the first magnitude. She was a silent girl, cool and aloofly remote and I liked her which made me a lonely minority of one.

"Doctors aren't infallible," I said. "At least, not this one." I peered at her in my best clinical fashion. "What's a girl like you doing in those parts on this floating museum?"

She hesitated. "That's a personal question."

"The medical profession are a very personal lot. How's your headache?

Your ulcer? Your bursitis? We don't know where to stop."

I need the money."

"You and me both." I smiled at her and she didn't smile back so I left her and went down the companionway to the main deck.

Here was located the Morning Rose's main passenger accommodation, two rows of cabins lining the fore and aft central passageway.