that seemed
to make up to him for his sleepless nights. You knew that he was in
trouble by the way that he took to the water. It's always a little
shivery at dawn, but he never hesitated. His wrapper was coming off by
the time he reached the float--it was too far off to mind watching
him--and into the water he'd go, head first, as quick as he could get
in. It was almost as if he was afraid he'd die before he got to it.
He was a fine swimmer, but oftenest he just lay about, sometimes with
his face under. Then he looked like a drowned man. Sometimes he went
in earlier than dawn. She had seen phosphorescence off the float in
the black night, and heard the clean, quiet splash of his dive.

Once he stayed in so long that Mrs. Fulton called to him from her
window, "_Please_ come in, John, I'm frightened." Oh, yes, she wanted
to be free from him, perhaps she still does, but not that way. If
anything had happened to him, if he had taken his life, for instance,
one imagined that in the first agonies of remorse she would have taken
hers too.

It must have been terrible for her--at first--never hearing from _you_,
not knowing where you were, or what you were doing, whether you were
sick or well. Of course she wanted you to be happy, but with _her_.
It would have been a comfort to know that you were suffering as much as
she was. And she couldn't know.

She had a calendar in her room. She kept tab on it of the days as they
passed, beginning with the first day of the probationary year. She'd
draw a line through each day--each day when she went to bed, and hoped
that the day was really over. She had her bad, wicked, black,
sleepless nights, too. You could always tell by how late she was in
the morning. She had a child's happy faculty of being able to make up
for lost sleep. Well, when the day seemed over she drew a line through
it. One day the chambermaid came below stairs (it was the first we
knew of it) and propounded a conundrum. "When is a day not a day?" No
one could guess. So she said, "When Mrs. Fulton doesn't draw a line
through it." So it seemed that the forty-ninth day of her probation
had not been a passage of time. Time had stood still. Why? Well, in
the afternoon Mrs. Fulton had gone as crew with a young gentleman who
owned a knockabout, and they had got wet to the skin, and had won a leg
on some pennant or other after a close, well-sailed race. Mrs. Fulton
had come home about dark, drenched,