s that would not let them lag, he sought the deck
companionway close at hand, and ran up to the deck above.

Not concrete yet, only dim and misty in his mind a plan took form.
Only one thing stood out, sharp-lined, clear, absolute, irrevocable in
itself--he must go to Marie-Louise paying the price. For, apart from
all else, apart from the certainty that if he went to her as the great
Laparde she would only bid him return again, not in bitterness but in
her splendid self-abnegation, apart from this--how else could he make
her believe him? He, a man who once had forsworn his oath; he, who
once, in her stead, had chosen in ghastly selfishness the fame, the
position, the place that were now his--how else could he make her
believe him? How else, unless he flung them from him, when once for
these very things, a traitor to his manhood and to her, he had turned
his back upon her, could she believe that now he held them as naught
compared to her; how else could she believe that in his soul and heart,
dominant, supreme, lived now only a love for her, greater than it had
ever been because it was chastened now, a love near like to her own
great wondrous love that she had offered him--and he had spurned? How
else--unless to-night the great Laparde should die, and in his place
should live again the Jean Laparde she once had known, the humble
fisherman of Bernay-sur-Mer? The fisherman of Bernay-sur-Mer! Yes,
that was it! It seemed to crystallise suddenly, sharply, into
definite, tangible form, the shadowy, nebulous plan that, from the
moment his decision had been made as he had stood and watched her there
below him on the steerage deck, had been seeking for expression in his
mind. The fisherman of Bernay-sur-Mer! None would recognise in the
fisherman of Bernay-sur-Mer the Jean Laparde that the world knew--none
save her!

He was before the door of his luxurious deck-suite, and in feverish
excitement now he flung it open, closed and locked it behind him,
switched on the lights, and ran through the sitting-room into the
bedroom beyond. Here, where there had been confusion, his things
thrown everywhere when he had dressed for dinner and the dance, all was
now in order, and his two steamer trunks were neatly stowed away--the
steward's work--beneath the brass bed. He dropped on his knees, and
hurriedly dragged one out--the one that Myrna Bliss had chosen for him
that day when they had gone to Marseilles from Bernay-sur-Mer. If