"Do you know this gentleman, Mr. Arthur Hartley?" he asked in the same
kindly way.

Again the troubled look, an apparent effort to seize some elusive
thought, and then again the voice I knew so well, but now so unnaturally
calm:

"I do not know him."

I stood aghast at what seemed the consummate acting of a heartless and
conscienceless woman, and yet on the instant I saw that there was no
acting there. Let me stop a moment, mother, and describe her. You
remember how beautiful she was, with that rich, dark beauty you once
spoke of as "Italian." It was that beauty that enslaved me. You remember
that I have written of her appearance as she lay on the deck the day she
was saved. The days of illness and quiet in the cabin below had almost
obliterated all the ravages done by wind and sun and sea. The olive
cheeks were a little darker than of old, and the hands browner. The face
was not quite so pure an oval as when you saw it last; the color of lip
and cheek not quite so vivid. The large brown eyes had lost the sparkle
and the changing light that once pierced my boyish, foolish heart. Clad
in a simple gown, belted at the waist and hanging in folds to the deck,
her dark hair parted across her broad forehead and confined in a simple
knot, and with a strange calm on the face that once expressed her
varying moods as they came and went, she seemed to me to be another, a
better, an almost unearthly Helen, come to me here to atone for the
great wrong that she had done me; and, for the moment, I forgot my hate.

My uncle gave his arm to Helen, and they walked the deck while I watched
them. What did it mean, this failure of Helen to recognize me? Was I
right in thinking the girl to be Helen Rankine. Yes; I could not be
mistaken. That graceful walk, some of its old-time spring and elasticity
gone, to be sure, was the walk of Helen; the turn of the lovely neck;
the pose of the head were hers. Then the story of the sailor, Jones, the
fore-castle gossip that she was going out to India to join her
soldier-lover; how well it tallied with what she had told me on that
fatal day when she spurned my proffered love. But I would not dwell more
on that. I will not now. I must force myself to forget, just for a
little time, the past, that I may solve the mystery of the present. My
head throbs; my brain is in a whirl.

April 4.--After writing this I threw myself into my berth and tried to
think over clearly the strange occurrences of the day.