anded on this
occasion, presenting herself indignantly to them, and looking in her
black velvet and white lace like a round-eyed child.

She thought of that happy moment this afternoon, with a little chill at
her heart. For there was no doubt that Jim had blue devils now. When she
came back to her stateroom at six o'clock, he was already there, flung
across the bed, his arms locked under his head, his sombre eyes on the
ceiling, where green water-lights were playing.

"Jim, don't you feel well, dear?"

"Perfectly well, thank you!" Jim said coldly.

Slightly angered by his tone, Julia fell silent, busied herself with her
brushes, hooked on a gown of demure cherry colour and gray, caught up a
great silky scarf.

"Anything I can do for you, Jim?" she said then, politely.

"Just--_let me alone_!" Jim answered, without stirring.

Hurt to the quick, and with sudden colour in her face, Julia left the
room. She held her head high, but she felt almost a little sick with the
shock. Five minutes later she was the centre of a chattering group on
the deck. A milky twilight held the sea, the skyline was no longer to be
discerned in the opal spaces all about them, the ship moved over a vast
plain of pearl-coloured smooth waters. Where staterooms were lighted,
long fingers of rosy brightness fell across the deck; here and there in
the shelter of a bit of wall were dark blots that were passengers,
wrapped and reclining, and unrecognizable in the gloom.

Julia and a young man named Manners began to pace the deck. Mr. Manners
was a poet, and absorbed in the fascinating study of his own
personality, but he served Julia's need just now, and never noticed her
abstraction and indifference. He described to Julia the birth of his own
soul, when he was what the world considered only a clumsy, unthinking
lad of seventeen, and Julia listened as a pain-racked fever patient
might listen with vague distress to the noise of distant hammers.

Presently they were all at dinner; soup, but no Jim; fish, but no Jim.
Here was Jim at last, pale, freshly shaven, slipping into his place with
a muttered apology and averted eyes. With a sense of impending calamity
upon her, Julia struggled through her dinner; after a while she found
herself holding cards, under a bright light; after a while again, she
reached her stateroom.

Julia turned up the light. The room was close and empty, littered with
the evidences of Jim's hasty toilet. She opened a window,