an to that of a discontented and envious family.

"Well," Cressida gathered herself up, "once I got out from under it all,
didn't I? And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again.
You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a
long while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka. That
time, at least, I shook the Garnets. I wasn't distracted or empty. That
time I was all there!"

"Yes," I echoed her, "that time you were all there. It's the greatest
possible satisfaction to remember it."

"But even that," she sighed, "was nothing but lawyers and accounts in the
end--and a hurt. A hurt that has lasted. I wonder what is the matter with
me?"

The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known,
she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easily
said, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship.

We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of her
life, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wish
to take a turn before we went inside. I pleaded indolence, but Cressida
rose and disappeared with him. Later I came upon them, standing at the
stern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed in
moonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor,
little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family
units, presumably,--male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawl
sat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if
it were a spell. In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but the
sound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response.
Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talk
between my friends. Cressida's voice was deep and entreating. She was
remonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keep
away from the cardroom.

"But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?" he
expostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard. "What is
there, now, to do?"

"Oh, Horace!" she murmured, "how can you be so? If I were twenty-two, and
a boy, with some one to back me--"

Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his top-coat. "Oh, I've
not your energy, Mother dear. We make no secret of that. I am as I am. I
didn't ask to be born into this charming world."

To this gallant speech Cressida made no answer. She stood with her h