and the sense of bodily discomfort oppressed
her. She whispered, shamefacedly, "I believe I've slept."

"I haven't," mumbled Jorgenson, growing more and more distinct to her
eyes. The brightness of the short dawn increased rapidly as if the sun
were impatient to look upon the Settlement. "No fear of that," he added,
boastfully.

It occurred to Mrs. Travers that perhaps she had not slept either. Her
state had been more like an imperfect, half-conscious, quivering death.
She shuddered at the recollection.

"What an awful night," she murmured, drearily.

There was nothing to hope for from Jorgenson. She expected him to
vanish, indifferent, like a phantom of the dead carrying off the
appropriately dead watch in his hand for some unearthly purpose.
Jorgenson didn't move. His was an insensible, almost a senseless
presence! Nothing could be extorted from it. But a wave of anguish as
confused as all her other sensations swept Mrs. Travers off her feet.

"Can't you tell me something?" she cried.

For half a minute perhaps Jorgenson made no sound; then: "For years
I have been telling anybody who cared to ask," he mumbled in his
moustache. "Telling Tom, too. And Tom knew what he wanted to do. How's
one to know what _you_ are after?"

She had never expected to hear so many words from that rigid shadow. Its
monotonous mumble was fascinating, its sudden loquacity was shocking.
And in the profound stillness that reigned outside it was as if there
had been no one left in the world with her but the phantom of that old
adventurer. He was heard again: "What I could tell you would be worse
than poison."

Mrs. Travers was not familiar with Jorgenson's consecrated phrases. The
mechanical voice, the words themselves, his air of abstraction appalled
her. And he hadn't done yet; she caught some more of his unconcerned
mumbling: "There is nothing I don't know," and the absurdity of the
statement was also appalling. Mrs. Travers gasped and with a wild little
laugh:

"Then you know why I called after King Tom last night."

He glanced away along his shoulder through the door of the deckhouse at
the growing brightness of the day. She did so, too. It was coming. It
had come! Another day! And it seemed to Mrs. Travers a worse calamity
than any discovery she had made in her life, than anything she could
have imagined to come to her. The very magnitude of horror steadied her,
seemed to calm her agitation as some kinds of fatal drugs do befor