ages. In a short while, he
declared, chemistry would solve the social question, and man would forget
what it is to worry about food. Why, chemistry was on the verge of
discovering how to make bread of stones, a thing that hitherto only
plants could do. Frederick continued in a similar strain, speaking
by rote, and scarcely looking up, yet fascinating his listeners.

But in the midst of the whirl of self-intoxication, he thought with a
shudder of bedtime, knowing he should not close his eyes the whole night.
And what recompense was the brightest height of the clearest day for the
hell of a single sleepless night, such as he had often spent within the
last years.

After dinner, he went with Doctor Wilhelm to the ladies' parlour, from
there to the smoking-room. Soon after, he went on deck, where it was dark
and gloomy and the wind was again whining dismally through the rigging of
the four masts. It was bitter cold, and snowflakes, it seemed to him,
swept his cheeks. Finally, there was nothing for him to do but go to bed.

For two hours, between eleven and one, he lay writhing in his berth,
sometimes for a short while falling into a troubled state between waking
and sleeping. In both states he saw visions, now a wild dance of faces,
now a single stark face, which tormented him and would not budge. Yet an
irresistible impulse gathered in him to keep his mental eye open for the
devilish play of supernatural powers.

He had turned out the electric lights, and in the dark, when the eye
is unoccupied, one is doubly sensitive to the messages of hearing and
feeling. He caught every sound, felt every movement, of the mighty ship,
steadily pursuing its course through the midnight. He heard the churning
of the propeller, like the labouring of a great demon condemned to slave
for mankind. He heard shouts and calls and the walking of men when the
coal-passers threw overboard the cinders from the huge boiler furnaces.
On the trip to New York those furnaces consumed over a thousand tons of
coal, and the casting away of the slag and ashes was left for the
nighttime. Thus, to the relief of the man wrestling with sleep, his
attention was drawn to the present and the things taking place in the
ship's body.

Yet, when there was no sound or movement to distract him, his imagination
succumbed to torturing thoughts of Mara and sometimes of his wife, with
whose sufferings he occasionally used to reproach himself. Now that
Ingigerd Hahlstroe