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Edwina smiled, clipping on a pair of her mother’s diamond earrings.
    “Is she going to New York?”
    The young Irish girl nodded, feeling blessed by the fates. “She was. She has an aunt and some cousins there, but I was after telling her to come to California. And she says she’ll try. I’ll do anything I can to help her.” Edwina smiled at her. The girl looked so happy, and it was nice for her to have relatives on the ship, and then suddenly she thought of something she knew her mother would have thought about too.
    “Did you wash your hands carefully when you came back?”
    “I did.” She looked faintly hurt, but she understood. To them, third class was like a disease, a place one never saw and wouldn’t want to. But it hadn’t been as bad as Oona had expected. It was nothing like her own cabin, of course, and none of the bits and pieces in the cabin were very fancy, but it was decent and clean, and it would get them all to America in one piece, and in the end, that was all that mattered. “Aren’t we lucky, Miss Edwina? To be on the same ship … fancy that … faith, I never thought I’d have so much good fortune.” She smiled at Edwina again, and went back to her cabin to watch the children, as Edwina walked into the parlor to join her parents and Charles. They were having dinner that night at the elegant A la Carte Restaurant, and Edwina could only agree with Oona as she smiled across the room at her intended. They were all lucky, and blessed, for the lives they led, the people they loved, the places they went to, and this beautiful ship taking them back to the States on its maiden voyage. As she stood holding Charles’s hand, in her pale blue satin dress, her hair softly piled high on her head, her engagement ring glistening on her finger, Edwina Winfield knew that inall her life, she had never been as lucky or as happy. And as she drifted into the hall on Charles’s arm, as Kate and Bertram chatted cozily, she knew it was going to be a special night, a prelude to a wonderful lifetime.

Chapter 3
     
    THE DAYS ON THE
TITANIC
SEEMED TO GLIDE BY WITH EASE and pleasure. There was so much to do, and seemingly so little time in which to do it. It was all too pleasurable, and so easy, suspended between two worlds, on the ship that offered absolutely everything from exquisite meals to squash games and swimming pools and Turkish baths.
    Phillip and Charles enjoyed several games of squash and rode the stationary bicycles and the mechanical horses every morning while Edwina tried the novelty of the electric camel. George rode the elevators instead, making friends, and the entire family had lunch together every day. And then, when the little ones went for naps with Oona, Kate and Bertram would go for long walks on the Promenade Deck, talking about things they hadn’t had time to discuss for years. But the days went too quickly, and they were over almost before they knew it.
    Their evenings were spent dining in either the maindining saloon or the even more elegant A la Carte Restaurant, where the Winfields were introduced to the Astors by Captain Smith on the second day of the trip. Mrs. Astor commented to Kate about their lovely family, and from several things she said, Kate deduced that the new Mrs. Astor was expecting. She was considerably younger than her husband, and they appeared to be very much in love. Whenever Kate saw them together after that, they were always talking quietly or holding hands, and once she had seen them kissing on their way into their stateroom. The Strauses were a couple Kate had decided she liked too. She had never seen two people so compatible and so obviously in love after so many years, and during her one or two conversations with Mrs. Straus she had discovered that she had a wonderful sense of humor.
    There were three hundred and twenty-five first-class passengers in all, many of them interesting, some well known, and she had particularly enjoyed meeting a woman named Helen