e woman after lighting the lamp had set it in the centre of a round
table and left the room. Between this table and the hearth an old man
sat in an arm-chair, smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper. The back
of the chair was turned toward the window, but over it Gilbart could see
the crown of a grey head and small, steady puffs of smoke ascending
between it and the upper edge of the paper. A light appeared in the
room above; the light of a candle behind the drawn blind. It lasted
there perhaps for ten minutes, and once the woman's shadow moved across
the blind.

The light went out, and after a minute or two the woman reappeared in
the parlour. She carried a work-basket, and after speaking a word with
the old man in the chair she set the basket down on the table, drew up a
chair and began to darn a child's stocking. Now and then she looked up
as if listening for some sound or movement in the room overhead, but
after a moment or two began to ply her needle again. The needle moved
more slowly--stopped--she bowed her head over the stocking.
Gilbart knew why. She was the wife of a petty officer on the
_Berenice_. The old man in the chair went on reading.

All this while a light had been growing in Gilbart's brain, and now he
saw. In this street, and the next, and the next, lived scores who had
sons, husbands, brothers on board the _Berenice_; thin walls of brick
and plaster dividing to-night their sore hearts and their prayers; a
whole town with its hopes and its happy days given into keeping of one
ship; not its love only but its trust for life's smallest comforts
following her as she moved away through the darkness. And he alone
knew! He had only to throw open the window--to fling four words into
that silent street--to shout, "The _Berenice_ is lost!"--and with the
breath of it windows would fly open, partitions fall down, and all those
privacies meet and answer in one terrible outcry. He put up a hand to
thrust it away--this awful gift of power. He would have none of it; he
was unfit. "Oh, my God!"--it was he, not Casey, who held the real
infernal machine. It was here, not in the _Berenice_, that the levin
must fall; and he, John Gilbart, held it in his fingers. "Oh, my God, I
am unfit--thrust not this upon me!"

But there was no escape. He must take his hat and run--run to the Port
Admiral. The errand was useless, he knew; for all the while at the back
of his soul's confusion some practical corners