nswered. "The years can carry no more than their
ordinary burden of sensations. If you try to fill them too full, you
lose everything."

"I shall try what I can do!" he remarked calmly.

She rose abruptly.

"I am afraid of you tonight," she said. "I am going downstairs. Will you
give my rug and cushion to the deck steward? And--good night."

She gave him her hand, but she did not look at him, and she hurried away
a little abruptly.

Wingrave yawned, and lighting a cigar, strolled up and down the deck.
A figure loomed out of the darkness and almost ran into him. It was the
young man in the serge suit. He muttered a clumsy apology and hurried
on.

A COCKNEY CONSPIRATOR

"The bar closes in ten minutes, sir!" the smoking room steward
announced.

The young man who had been the subject of Wingrave's remarks hastily
ordered another drink, although he had an only half-emptied tumbler in
front of him. Presently he stumbled out on to the deck. It was a dark
night, and a strong head wind was blowing. He groped his way to the
railing and leaned over, with his head half buried in his hands. Below,
the black tossing sea was churned into phosphorescent spray, as the
steamer drove onwards into the night.

Was it he indeed--George Richardson? He doubted it. The world of tape
measures and calico counters seemed so far away; the interior of
his quondam lodgings in a by-street of Islington, so unfamiliar and
impossible. He felt himself swallowed up in this new and bewildering
existence, of which he was so insignificant an atom, the existence where
tragedy reared her gloomy head, and the shadows of great things loomed
around him. Down there in the cold restless waste of black waters--what
was it that he saw? The sweat broke out upon his forehead, the blood
seemed turned to ice in his veins. He knew very well that his fancy
mocked him, that it was not indeed a man's white face gleaming on the
crest of the waves. But none the less he was terrified.

Mr. Richardson was certainly nervous. Not all the brandy he had
drunk--and he had never drunk half as much before in his life--afforded
him the least protection from these ghastly fancies. The step of a
sailor on the deck made him shiver; the thought of his empty state room
was a horror. He tried to think of the woman at whose bidding he had
left behind him Islington and the things that belonged to Islington! He
tried to recall her soft suggestive whispers, the glances which pro