gh the tired eyelids sank. "Let
down your ear," murmured the lips.

Hugh knelt, bent, waited. The distressed twins watched them. The hold on
his hand relaxed. He lifted and looked.

"What do he say?" tearfully asked old Joy, pressing in.

"Nothing," said Hugh; and then to the twins: "He's gone."

* * * * *

Out in the benign starlight and caressing breeze Hugh hastened to his
father's door.

XLVII

INSOMNIA

Down in the cabin, in one of its best staterooms, where all were choice,
the senator wooed slumber.

In vain. Sounds were no obstacle. They abounded but they were normal.
Except--"Peck-peck-peck" and so on, which the steady pulse of normal
sounds practically obliterated. The peck-pecking was not for him.

An unwelcome odor may keep one awake, but the senator's berth was
fragrant of fresh mattresses and new linen, the wash-stand of jasmine
soap, and the room at large of its immaculate zinc-white walls and doors
and their gilt trimmings. Nor could the cause be his supper of beefsteak
and onions, black coffee, hot rolls, and bananas, for every one about
him had had those, and every one about him was sound asleep. It could
not be for lack of the bath; he had already slept well without it too
many nights hand-running. Nor could it be a want of special
nightclothes; he had won his election over a nightshirt aristocrat, as
being not too pampered to sleep, like the sons of toil, in the shirt he
had worn all day and would wear again to-morrow. Nor yet was it nicotine
or alcohol, the putting of which into him was like feeding cottonwood to
Hayle's old _Huntress_. Such, at least, was his private conviction. Oh,
he knew the cause! He believed he could drop into sleep as this boat's
sounding-lead could drop to the river's bottom, if for one minute he
could get his mind off that singularly old, contemptibly young
poker-face.

Recalling that face and the grandfather's as he had confronted them
together earlier in the journey, they were a double reminder of the
Franklinian maxim--he kept a store of such things for stump use--that an
old young man makes a young old man. But maxims didn't bring sleep; he
turned the pillow and damned the maxim and the men, with Benjamin
Franklin to boot.

It tossed him from his right side to his left, to think of his own part
in this two days' episode, and of the flocks of passengers stepping
ashore at various landings who, as sure as--hmm!--would