other moment,
muttering some incoherency about air, he had snatched up his cap and was
gone again.

Julia slowly crossed the room, and sat down on her bed. She felt as a
person who had swallowed a dose of poison might feel: agonies were soon
to begin that would drive the life from her body, but she could not feel
them yet. Instead she felt tired, tired beyond all bearing, and the
lights hurt her eyes. She slipped her kimono from her, stepped out of
her slippers, and plunged the room into utter darkness. Like a tired
child she crept into bed, and with a great sigh dropped her head on the
pillow.

The ship plowed on, its great lights cutting a steady course over the
black water, its whole bulk quivering to the heartbeat of the mighty
engines; whispered good-nights and laughing good-nights were said in the
narrow, hot hallways. Lights went out in cabin after cabin. The decks
were dark and deserted. Below stairs the world that never slept hummed
like a beehive; squads of men were washing floors, laying tables; the
kitchen was as hot and busy as at midday; the engine rooms were filled
with silhouetted forms briskly coming and going. Up on one of the dark
decks, with the soft mist blowing in his face, Jim spent the long night,
his folded arms resting on the rail, his sombre eyes following the
silent rush of waters, and in her cabin Julia lay wide awake and
battling with despair.

She had thought the old dim horror over and done with. Now she knew it
never would be that; now she knew there was no escape. The happy little
castle she had builded for herself fell about her like a house of cards;
she was dishonoured, she was abased, she was powerless. In telling Jim
her whole history, on that terrible night at the settlement house, she
had flung down her arms; there was no new extenuating fact to add to the
story; it was all stale and unchangeable; it must stand before their
eyes forever, a hideous fact. And it seemed to Julia, tossing restlessly
in the dark, that a thousand sleeping menaces rose now to terrify her.
Perhaps Hannah Palmer knew! Julia's breath stopped, her whole body shook
with terror. And if Hannah, why not others? A letter of Mark's to some
one--to any one--might be in existence now, waiting its hour to appear,
and to disgrace her, and Jim, and all who loved them!

And was it for this, she asked herself bitterly, that she had so risen
from the past, so studied and struggled and aspired? Had she been mad
all t