a chair put for herself under her window and
sat there, veiled and swathed and turning her face away whenever a rare
wandering passenger happened to pass along. Toward noon a man paused
before her to light a cigarette. She, forgetting for the moment her
precautions, looked at him. It chanced that he looked at her at
exactly the same instant. Their glances met. He started nervously,
moved on a few steps, returned. Said she mockingly:

"You know you needn't speak if you don't want to, Stanley."

"There isn't a soul on board that anybody ever knew or that ever knew
anybody," said he. "So why not?"

"And you look horribly bored."

"Unspeakably," replied Baird. "I've spoken to no one since I left
Paris."

"What are you doing on this ship?" inquired she.

"To be perfectly honest," said he, "I came this way to avoid you. I
was afraid you'd take passage on my steamer just to amuse yourself with
my nervousness. And--here you are!"

"Amusing myself with your nervousness."

"But I'm not nervous. There's no danger. Will you let me have a chair
put beside yours?"

"It will be a charity on your part," said she.

When he was comfortably settled, he explained his uneasiness. "I see
I've got to tell you," said he, "for I don't want you to think me a
shouting ass. The fact is my wife wants to get a divorce from me and
to soak me for big alimony. She's a woman who'll do anything to gain
her end, and--well, for some reason she's always been jealous of you. I
didn't care to get into trouble, or to get you into trouble."

"I'm traveling as Mary Stevens," said Mildred. "No one knows I'm
aboard."

"Oh, I'm sure we're quite safe. We can enjoy the rest of this voyage."

A sea voyage not merely induces but compels a feeling of absolute
detachment from the world. To both Stanley and Mildred their
affairs--the difficulties in which they were involved on terra
firma--ceased for the time to have any reality. The universe was
nothing but a vast stretch of water under a vast stretch of sky; the
earth and the things thereof were a retrospect and a foreboding.
Without analyzing it, both he and she felt that they were free--free
from cares, from responsibilities--free to amuse themselves. And they
proceeded to enjoy themselves in the necessarily quiet and limited way
imposed by the littleness of their present world and the meagerness of
the resources.

As neither had the kind of mind that expands in abstractions, they