ay of the
voyage was something quite immeasurable; it was marked by a void as
that which separates life and death. She was incapable of reasoned
reflection. A series of mental pictures, a startling jumble of
ideas--trivial as the wish to save the clothes from a wetting,
tremendous as the near prospect of eternity--danced through her brain
with bewildering clearness. She felt that if she were fated to live to
a ripe old age she would never forget a single detail of the furniture
and decorations of the room. She would hear forever the dolorous
howling of the gale, the thumping of the waves against the quivering
plates, the rapid, methodic thud of the donkey-engine, which, long
since deserted by its cowardly attendant, was faithfully doing its work
and flooding the ship with electric light.

She could scarcely believe that it was she, Elsie Maxwell, who stood
there on the tremulous island of the ship amidst a stormy ocean the
like of which she had never seen before. She seemed to possess an
entity apart from herself, to be a passive witness of events as in a
dream; presently, she would awake and find that she was back in her
pleasant room at the Morrisons' hacienda, or tucked up in her own
comfortable cabin. Yet here was proof positive that the terror which
environed her was real. Bound up with the thunder of the gale were the
words, "Your loving sister, Madge"--evidently the sister Captain
Courtenay had spoken of--"matron of a hospital in the suburbs of
London," he said. Would he ever see her again? Or his mother? Had he
thought of them at all during this night of woe? Beneath his iron mask
did tears lurk, and dull agony, and palsied fear--surely a man could
suffer like a woman, even though he endured most nobly?

And then, not thinking in the least what she was doing, she scrutinized
the closely tied packet. She wondered idly why he treasured so many
missives. Each and every one, oddly enough, was written on differently
sized and variously colored note-paper. And it could be seen at a
glance that they were from as many different people. The outside
letter was the most clearly visible. Miss Courtenay wrote a
well-formed, flowing hand. If handwriting were a clue to character,
she was a candid, generous, open-minded woman.

But what was this? Elsie suddenly threw down the letters. She had
read a sentence at the top of the page twice before she actually
grasped its purport. When its significance dawned