lf over and over again--Jean had not realised what he was
doing, Jean had not realised what he was doing. It was like Jean, so
like the big, brave Jean of the old days to give his all on the impulse
of the moment, and never a thought to what it might mean in the
afterwards. That was why she had sent him away that night--that was
why. She would not have been strong enough to have done it for any
other cause. She had only been strong because of the bitter regret,
the misery that would have come when he began to realise, even with a
few hours of the hardships of the steerage, what he had lost--he who
would have come from comfort, from refinement to where even soap and
water were luxuries; to food that he could not eat, dealt out of huge
kettles into dinner pails; to where there was little light and the air
was foul; to where like cattle in a pen they slept two hundred in a
compartment; to where, instead of servants at his beck and call, there
was cold, brutal contempt--and oftentimes a curse; to where, even to
her, who had not known the luxuries of Jean's life, it had brought
dismay! Yes; in a day of this, even in a few hours of it, with its
terrific contrast, he would have known, and--and his love, great as it
must have been to have prompted his impulse to the sacrifice that he
had tried to make, would not be strong enough to compensate for what he
had lost, to make him happy. And so--and so she had sent him back.
And the _bon Dieu_ had been very good to her to give her the strength
to do it, for she had been right, and she had known Jean better than he
knew himself. She had been right; it had been only impulse, stronger
than himself for the moment, that had brought him to her, only
impulse--for he had gone back. She had not seen him since that night,
not even a glimpse of him amongst the passengers on what little of
those decks above that she could see, though she had looked whenever,
safe from observation herself amongst a crowd of the steerage
passengers, she had ventured out on deck. She would have liked to have
asked about him, but who was there to ask? To the steerage the life of
the great ship was as a thing apart; no news, nothing came to the
steerage--sufficient to the steerage was the babel of its own
hundred-tongues.

She brushed the tears angrily from her eyes. She should be glad and
thankful that she had not been unfair to Jean, that she had not taken
advantage of that moment of impulse to so treme