y, too, it was because she felt herself so guiltily
frivolous, having anything to say to him, or even standing in his gaze,
gazing into it, while his father, her brother, and the bishop lay as
they were lying in their several rooms so close overhead.

"You _can_ help me," he said in his magisterial voice, so deep yet so
soft. "You will. You must. I cannot spare you."

Did any one ever! She tossed a faint defiance: "I can't. No. I
won't--can't--ever again, against my own kin."

"There are things stronger than kin."

"I'd like to know what!"

"Truth. Justice. Honor. Right. Public welfare."

She waved them all away as wholly immaterial. "Hoh!"

With a kindness far too much like magnanimity to suit her, Hugh, drawing
backward, smiled, and replied, not as pressing the argument but as
dropping it:

"One can be against one's kin, yet not against them. Basile knows that.
He proved it to-day."

"Basile--oh, Mr. Hugh, Basile wants to see you. Mom-a's sent me as much
for you as for the twins. Basile's asked for you. But of course if your
father----"

"I'll come, the moment I can be spared. Is your brother really better?"

Ramsey flinched as from pain. She leaned on the shoulder of the
nurse--who had come close--and sadly shook her head. But then she
straightened smilingly and said: "If you're coming at all----"

She might have finished but for a faint sound that reached her from
directly underfoot, a sound of sawing. She faced sharply about, passed
into the cabin, and found the Gilmores and the amateurs in the midst of
their play.

XLIII

WHICH FROM WHICH

This world of tragic contrasts and cross-purposes, realities and
fictions, this world where the many so largely find their inspiration in
the performances of the few, was startlingly typified to Ramsey as, out
of the upper night and the darkness of her troubles, she came in upon
the show; the audience sitting in their self-imposed twilight of a few
dimmed lamps, designedly forgetful of the voyage for which all were
there, and the players playing their parts as though the play were the
only thing real.

If the prefigurement was at any point vague it was none the less
arresting. As the _Votaress_--or Gideon Hayle's _Wild Girl_--might, in
full career, strike on hidden sands, so Ramsey struck on the thought--or
call it the unformulated perception--that whoever would really live
must, by clear choice and force of will, keep himself--herself--adjusted
to