lf-control.

ii

"Hullo, hullo!" Keith cried, and was at once by her side. "Here; have a
drink of water." Jenny, steadying herself by the table, sipped a little
of the water.

"Is it the wine that's made me stupid?" she asked. "I feel as if my
teeth were swollen, and my skin was too tight for my bones. Beastly!"

"How horrid!" Keith said lightly, taking from her hand the glass of
water. "If it's the wine you won't feel the effects long. Go on deck if
you like. You'll feel all right in the air. I'll clear away." Jenny
would not leave him. She shook her head decidedly. "Wait a minute, then.
I'll come too!"

They moved quickly about, leaving the fruit and little sweets and
almonds upon the sidetable, but carrying everything else through a
sleeping-cabin into the galley. It was this other cabin that still
further deepened Jenny's sense of pain--of inferiority. That was the
feeling now most painful. She had just realised it. She was a common
girl; and Keith--ah, Keith was secure enough, she thought.

In that moment Jenny deliberately gave him up. She felt it was
impossible that he should love her. When she looked around it was with a
sorrowfulness as of farewell. These things were the things that Keith
knew and had known--that she would never again see but in the bitter
memories of this night. The night would pass, but her sadness would
remain. She would think of him here. She gave him up, quite humble in
her perception of the disparity between them. And yet her own love would
stay, and she must store her memory full of all that she would want to
know when she thought of his every moment. Jenny ceased to desire him.
She somehow--it may have been by mere exhausted cessation of
feeling--wished only to understand his life and then never to see him
again. It was a kind of numbness that seized her. Then she awoke once
again, stirred by the bright light and by the luxury of her
surroundings.

"This where you sleep?" With passionate interest in everything that
concerned him, Jenny looked eagerly about the cabin. She now indicated a
broad bunk, with a beautifully white counterpane and such an eiderdown
quilt as she might optimistically have dreamed about. The tiny cabin was
so compact, and so marvellously furnished with beautiful things that it
seemed to Jenny a kind of suite in tabloid form. She did not understand
how she had done without all these luxurious necessities for
five-and-twenty years.

"Sometimes," Keith an