ng with a sense of the pain she had given him. He promised himself to
write to her, and beg her not to care for him, because he was not worthy
of that. He framed a letter in his mind, in which he posed in some noble
attitudes, and brought tears into his eyes by his magnanimous appeal
to her not to suffer for the sake of one so unworthy of her serious
thought. He pictured her greatly moved by some of the phrases, and he
composed for her a reply, which led to another letter from him, and so
to a correspondence and a long and tender friendship. In the end he
died suddenly, and then she discovered that she had always loved him.
He discovered that he was playing the fool again, and he rose from the
berth where he had tumbled himself. The state-room had that smell of
parboiled paint which state-rooms have, and reminded him of the steamer
in which he had gone to Europe when a boy, with the family, just after
his mother's health began to fail.

He went down on the deck near the ladies' saloon, where the second-class
passengers were gathered listening to the same band of plantation
negroes who had amused him so much on the eastward trip. The passengers
were mostly pock marked Provincials, and many of them were women; they
lounged on the barrels of apples neatly piled up, and listened to the
music without smiling. One of the negroes was singing to the banjo, and
another began to do the rheumatic uncle's breakdown. Mavering said to
himself: "I can't stand that. Oh, what a fool I am! Alice, I love you. O
merciful heavens! O infernal jackass! Ow! Gaw!"

At the bow of the boat he found a gang of Italian labourers returning to
the States after some job in the Provinces. They smoked their pipes
and whined their Neapolitan dialect together. It made Mavering think
of Dante, of the Inferno, to which he passed naturally from his
self-denunciation for having been an infernal jackass. The inscription
on the gate of hell ran through his mind. He thought he would make his
life--his desolate, broken life--a perpetual exile, like Dante's. At the
same time he ground his teeth, and muttered: "Oh, what a fool I am! Oh,
idiot! beast! Oh! oh!" The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took
out his cigarette case. The Italians looked at him; he gave all the
cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself. He determined
to spend the miserable remnant of his life in going about doing good and
bestowing alms.

He groaned aloud, so that the Italian