evidently been part of a small sack. Slowly he turned to the girl
and met her eyes. She was trembling in her eagerness for him to
understand.

"That is YOU," he said, tapping the central figure in the sketch,
and nodding at her. "You--with your hair down, and fighting a
bunch of men who look as though they were about to beat your
brains out with clubs! Now--what in God's name does it mean? And
here's a ship up in the corner. That evidently came first. You
landed from that ship, didn't you? From the ship--the ship--the
ship--"

"Skunnert!" she cried softly, touching the ship with her finger.
"Skunnert--Sibirien!"

"Schooner-Siberia," translated Philip. "It sounds mightily like
that, Celie. Look here--" He opened his pocket atlas again at the
map of the world. "Where did you start from, and where did you
come ashore? If we can get at the beginning of the thing--"

She had bent her head over the crook of his arm, so that in her
eager scrutiny of the map his lips for a moment or two touched the
velvety softness of her hair. Again he felt the exquisite thrill
of her touch, the throb of her body against him, the desire to
take her in his arms and hold her there. And then she drew back a
little, and her finger was once more tracing out its story on the
map. The ship had started from the mouth of the Lena River, in
Siberia, and had followed the coast to the blue space that marked
the ocean above Alaska. And there the little finger paused, and
with a hopeless gesture Celie intimated that was all she knew.