Stainton recovered. Only someone in a fundamentally bad condition could long remain ill aboard this sea-express in the weather that now befell, and Jim's condition was good. Consequently, within another twenty-four hours he was wholly himself again and wholly able to enjoy the rest of the voyage.

Muriel, meanwhile, had not told him of her last conversation with von Klausen and of its termination. She convinced herself that she had taken the young man's hand merely to calm his fears; that she had been unconscious of the action until the fog had lifted; that von Klausen understood this, and that, moreover, the whole episode had endured for but a small fraction of time. She could not, in the circumstances, tell Jim the truth. The present was, indeed, one of those instances that hamper the plain practice of what are accepted in theory as the simple virtues; it was a case where the telling of the truth would be the conveyance of a falsehood. If she had said: "I reached out and took this man's hand and held it while we were passing through a brief curtain of fog," Stainton, she made certain, would have supposed that she was herself afraid in the fog or that she wished to touch von Klausen's hand for the sake of the action itself. Now, she argued, either of these suppositions would be erroneous. The only way in which to give the true value to what she had done would be to repeat what the Austrian had told her of his personal terrors, and that, obviously, would have been a breach of confidence.

Nevertheless, she thought for some time before she hit upon this satisfactory train of logic. She did not, indeed, hit upon it until the succeeding morning. She had not forgotten what she felt on the night when Jim told her that he loved her. She had felt then that she must always be honest with this honest man concerning herself, and she meant, even yet, to be loyal to that decision; but she had now, as one has said, detected for the first time the fundamental paradox of our moral system: that, whereas the code of life is simple, life itself is complex; that the real world forever presents difficulties involving the ideal law in a cobweb of contradictions; that the best of human beings can but rarely do an imperative right to one individual without thereby doing a patent wrong to another; that truth at its highest is relative and approximate and that, in short, the moral laws are, for those who accept them, nothing more than a standard of perfection toward which their subjects can but approach and to which reality is hourly enforcing exceptions.

Learn her lesson, Muriel, however, at last did. It came to her in the morning after she had wakened from a refreshing, though tardy, sleep, rocked by the motion of the ship, which somehow miraculously cleared her mental vision. She lay still, repeating it, while Stainton, as she saw through her half-opened lids, got up, laboriously shaved, and put on his clothes. She knew that he must think her asleep, and she was much too preoccupied with the solution of her problem voluntarily to disabuse him of this belief.

But Stainton was mindful of the displeasure that he had encountered on the morning in Aiken when he went downstairs without her. He bent over her in her berth and kissed her.

"Are you going to get up, now?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"You go. Don't mind me," she drowsily murmured. "I don't mind."

"Sure not?"

"Not this once. Go on, dear. I'll be along presently."

She was left alone. She rose and went to the mirror in the wardrobe door. She drew back the curtain from the port-hole and let in the morning light. She examined, with anxious care, her face. She looked with equal care at her body. By a tacit understanding, she and Jim avoided all direct mention of her condition, he because he feared a recurrence of her hysterical revolt, she because she had fallen upon one of those futile moods in which we feel that to speak of an approaching catastrophe is to hasten it; but twice a day, when she could do it unobserved, she sought, in silent terror, for the tokens that could not possibly so soon be seen.

Relieved for the moment, she returned to bed and another nap. That accomplished, she dressed slowly, made her way to the saloon, and breakfasted alone. She began to eat with the mighty appetite that had directed her at her previous meals since leaving New York, but this morning there occurred to her a possible explanation of her hunger that made her leave the table with half its dishes untouched. She climbed the promenade-deck and there saw Stainton and von Klausen walking arm-in-arm.

The two men were in sharp contrast. The young Austrian, lithe, easy, an experienced voyager, trod the deck as he would have trod any other floor; his cheeks glowed and his blue eyes sparkled with health and the zest of life. Not so his companion. Stainton, although he bulked large and sturdy beside von Klausen, still showed some of the effects of his sickness: his face was drawn and grey, his glance dull, and he lurched with every roll of the ship.

Muriel was conscious of a distinctly unpleasant sensation. She felt that it was a little ridiculous of Jim thus publicly to exhibit his unfitness for sea-travel. She resented this juxtaposition on its own merits. The next instant, moreover, she was annoyed by her husband because he had not let her have the pleasure of presenting to him this ship-companion that, after all, was hers by right of discovery. Nor was that all: she felt no small degree of bitterness against von Klausen at the assumption that it might have been he who sought this acquaintanceship. Finally, she was disquieted by she knew not what: by, in reality, the fact that her husband, though she would not admit it, looked pale and old beside a man that looked uncommonly ruddy and young. She recalled with a blush what she had said to the captain of her husband's age, what the Austrian had said to her upon the same subject; she recalled his conjecture that he had seen her with her "father." She wondered now if von Klausen would have the impudence to offer to Jim in her presence an apology for his stupid mistake.

Von Klausen, as the event showed, had no impudence at all. Both he and Stainton greeted her heartily, the latter with a trifle more solicitude for her health than she thought seemly; and the Austrian was soon installed in a chair beside Stainton's.

"But do I not trespass?" inquired von Klausen with his sweeping inclination.

"On us?" said Jim. "Certainly not. Mighty glad to have you, I'm sure. You see, you have been extremely good to my wife while I was laid up."

Von Klausen looked at the name on the chair-back:

"Yet this person to whom the chair belongs?"

"Oh," Muriel encouraged him, in moral reaction against her recent annoyance, "that person hasn't been on deck once since we sailed."

Whereupon they all sat down, and the two men fell to talking while the band played in the sunlight and the blue-coated stewards handed about their trays. They talked, the American and the Austrian, of the differences between the United States and Austria, as noted by them, of money markets and percentages, of international law and treaties and standing armies and a host of other things that Muriel did not understand and did not care to understand. And she did not like it.

As the voyage progressed, Stainton and von Klausen became more and more friendly, and Muriel more and more restless, she could not tell why. Her husband had passed his entire manhood among men and had acquired, though he did not know it, the taste for the discussion of what, because of the inferior grade of education that we grant to women, we magnificently call manly topics. These he had not enjoyed since his wedding-day, and now he was hungry for them. He did not neglect Muriel, and von Klausen often made efforts to bring her into their conversations, but her mind had never been trained to these subjects and was, moreover, now filled with a more intimate concern. For an hour she would sit beside Jim and listen to him with some admiration, but less comprehension of his technical terms, and then for fifteen minutes she would leave the pair and walk the deck alone.

"To me it seems," von Klausen was one day saying, "that the great danger in your country is the disintegration of the unit of society, the break-up of the home."

"Oh," said Stainton, "you're referring to our divorce laws?"

The captain nodded.

"Well, how are they in your country?" asked Jim.

"In Austria the code of 1811 is still in force, and under it there are divorces allowed for violence, cruelty, desertion, incompatibility, and adultery. Adultery is a crime and is punishable by five years' imprisonment."

"That sounds as if your code is pretty broad, too," remarked Stainton.

"Ah, but it is applicable only to persons that are not Catholics, and Austria is a Catholic country."

"I see. And what do the Catholics do?"

"They remain married."

"Always?"

"The law allows them the remedy of judicial separation."

Stainton was smoking a cigar. He puffed at it thoughtfully.

"Judicial separation," he finally said, "has always struck me as begging the question. It denies liberty and yet winks at license. A good marriage ought to be guarded and a bad one broken."

"That," replied von Klausen, "is the American view."

"Not at all. We have all sorts of views—and there is one great trouble. You can get a divorce for nothing in Nevada, and you can't get it for anything in South Carolina. The South Carolina result is that they have had to pass a law there removing illegitimacy as a bar to succession."

"Nevertheless," said von Klausen, "except for Japan, there are more divorces in the United States than in any other country in the world. I was told, while I was in Washington, that the American statistics were—they showed seventy-nine divorces to every hundred thousand of your population. Your divorces increase more rapidly than your population; they increase more rapidly than your marriage-rate."

"I don't know about that," said Stainton; "although I believe that I have seen some such figures given somewhere, but I am clear on one point: the man that treats his wife badly ought not to be allowed the chance to have a wife any longer." He looked at Muriel, seated at his side; he smiled and patted her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair. "Don't you think so, dear?" he asked.

Muriel smiled in answer.

"Of course I do," said she. "Don't you, Captain von Klausen?"

The Austrian's face remained serious.

"I am of the religion of my country," he said.

"Eh?" said Stainton. "Oh, I beg your pardon."

"Not at all. Please." Von Klausen waived religious immunity. "I govern myself one way, but I do not object to hear the reasons why other people should choose other ways. Your way—your American way of divorce—is one of the peculiarities of your great nation, and so I studied it much while I lived there. If you permit, sir, to say it: the figures do not well bear out the boast that the American husband is the best husband. So, Mrs. Stainton?"

"But he is, just the same," protested Muriel.

"What do the figures show?" asked Jim.

"That two divorces are granted to wives to every one granted husbands."

"With all the respect to the best wife in the world," chuckled Stainton, as he again patted Muriel's hand, "that is largely due to the fact that the average American is so good a husband that, innocent as he may be, he pretends to be the guilty party."

Von Klausen's eyes twinkled shrewdly.

"Is it not a little," he enquired, "because the disgrace of being judged a guilty husband is easier to bear than the ridicule that is involved in being unable to keep the love of one's wife?"

"Perhaps it is; perhaps it is," admitted Stainton. "But your figures do not prove anything against us as husbands, Captain. The only reason that similar figures don't show the men of other countries to be worse husbands than we are—if, indeed, they don't show it—is that the laws of other countries simply do not permit such easy divorce."

"Then what of your population?" asked the Austrian, reverting to his previous line of attack. "It declines as divorce rises in your country."

Muriel rose abruptly.

"I think I shall take a little walk," she said.

Stainton half-rose. Von Klausen sprang to his feet.

"Permit me——" began the Captain.

"No, no," said Muriel; "please sit still, both of you."

"But, my dear——" said Stainton.

"I don't want to interrupt your talk," the girl said. "Finish that and then join me, Jim."

"In ten minutes, then," said Stainton.

The men resumed their chairs. They looked after her strong young body as, the wind blowing her skirt about her, she walked away.

"At all events," said Stainton heartily, "there goes the best American wife."

Von Klausen had grown accustomed to the open domesticity of Americans. He did not smile.

"She is a charming lady," he agreed. He looked out to sea. "And a beautiful." After a moment he added: "Do you object, sir, if I say that it is delightful, the manner in which the black hair gathers over her forehead and that in which she carries her gracious head?"

"Object, Captain? I say you're quite right. I'm a lucky man. Have you ever seen more lovely eyes?"

Von Klausen was still looking out to sea.

"In all the world I have seen but one pair that was their equal," he answered.

Stainton pulled at his cigar.

"You were saying,"—he returned to their previous subject—"that the American birth-rate declined as divorce grew. Do you think the increase of the one causes the decrease of the other?"

"I admit that the rate falls in times of commercial depression."

"Of course: divorce and birth are both expensive. If you would look into the matter a little closer, Captain, I think you would find that the growth of child labour and the cost of living have about as much to do with the fall in the birth-rate as anything else. Some of our divorces are granted to foreigners that come to America because they can't get easy divorces in their native lands. Most are given for desertion, which generally means that they are arranged by mutual consent. Nearly as many result from charges of 'cruelty,' which is as often as not the man's habit of whistling in the house when his wife has a headache—'constructive cruelty' we call it, although 'concocted cruelty' would be a better term. Adultery comes only next, I am told, and then neglect to provide, and drunkenness. The other causes are all lower in the list. So you see that when our divorces are not really the result of a quiet agreement between the husband and wife—and every judge that signs a decree knows in his heart that nine-tenths are that—they are the result of conduct which, for anybody who does not consider marriage a sacrament, abundantly justifies the action."

The talk shifted to Wall Street and continued for half an hour.

"Von Klausen has some antiquated ideas," remarked Stainton to Muriel as they were going to bed that night; "but he seems to be a pretty good sort of man. I like him."

Muriel was standing before the mirror, brushing the blue-black hair that fell nearly to her knees.

"Do you?" she asked, with no show of interest.

"Yes, he has good stuff in him. Of course, he's a mere boy, but he has good stuff in him, I'm sure."

"I don't see why you call him a boy," said Muriel,

"Why? Why, because he is a boy, my dear."

"I'm sure you seem just as young as he is."

Stainton laughed and kissed her.

"Little Loyalty!"

"I don't care," said Muriel, "I don't like him."

"You don't? Why, I thought——"

"I did like him at first, but I don't any more."

"Why not? You ought to. He admires you tremendously."

"Does he? How do you know?"

"By what he says. He told me to-day that he had never seen but one pair of eyes equal to yours."

"Only one? That was nice of him, I'm sure. What else did he say?"

"He said—oh, lots of things. He said you had beautiful hair and that it somehow grew in curves from your forehead, and I said that he was quite right."

"Is that all?"

"All I can remember. How much do you want, anyhow?"

"Well, I don't like him."

"But why not?"

"I don't know. I suppose because you like him too well. I hardly see you any more."

Stainton assured his wife that no man or woman in the world was worth her little finger. He clambered into the upper berth and watched her for some time as her bared arm rose and fell, wielding the brush. At last the sight of that regular motion, added to the gentle rocking of the ship, closed his eyes. He had had a full day and was tired. He was soundly asleep when he was wakened by her embrace.

She was standing on the ladder and pressing his face to hers.

"Love me!" she was whispering. "O, Jim, love me!"

Stainton was still half-asleep,

"I do love you, Muriel," he said.

"Yes, but—Love me, Jim!" she whispered.

She clutched him suddenly.

"Ouch, my hair!" said Stainton. "You're pulling my hair!"

"Oh!" Muriel's tone was all self-reproach. "I'm sorry. Did I hurt you, dear?"

"No," he smiled. "No. There, there!" He patted her head. "It's all right. Good-night, dearest."

"Good-night?" There was a question in the words as she repeated them, but she retreated, albeit slowly, down the ladder. "Good-night, Jim."

"Good-night, dear," he responded cheerily, "and—I do love you, you know."

She answered from below:

"Yes, Jim."

"You do know it, don't you, dear heart?"

"Yes, Jim."

He heard her draw the bedclothes about her. When he awoke in the morning, she slept, but he would not breakfast until she was ready to breakfast with him, and so he sat, hungry, and waited for the hour that she devoted to her toilette. Then they went to the saloon, and afterwards to the deck, together.

Neither on that day nor on the day following was Muriel alone with von Klausen. Indeed, she was not alone with him again until they touched, at ten o'clock of a bright morning, at Plymouth, where the grateful green and yellow hills rose from the blue water, and the town nestled in a long white belt behind a chain of grim, grey men-of-war. The tender had stood by, and, now that some of the high stacks of mail-bags, which had been filling the stern decks since dawn, were transferred, an endless procession of slouching porters out of uniform carried, one brick to each man for each trip, large bricks of silver down the gangways and deposited them in piles of five, well forward on the tender. Jim had gone to the writing-room to scribble a note that might catch a fast boat from England to his agent at the mine, and Muriel was left beside the rail to talk with the Austrian.

"It has been a delightful voyage, has it not?" he asked, in that precise English to which she had now grown accustomed.

"I dare say," answered Muriel. "I don't know. You forget that I have had no others with which to compare it."

"But you have not been bored?"

"No."

"It has surely been pleasant, for I have by it had the opportunity to meet you and your brave husband."

"My husband, I know, would say as much of it because he has met you."

The Austrian bowed.

"Nor have I failed," he said, "to tell him how much the entire company aboard seem to admire his charming wife."

Muriel was resting her elbows on the rail; her glance was fixed upon the distant town.

"He told me," she responded, "that you thought my eyes about the second best within your experience. I hope your experience has been wide."

Von Klausen flushed.

"My experience," he said, gravely, "has, I regret to tell you, been that of most young men."

"Oh!" said Muriel. Her tone showed dislike of all that this implied, but she recalled that Jim had had no such experiences as those to which von Klausen plainly referred, and she suddenly felt, somehow, that this difference between the men did not altogether advance Stainton.

"Nevertheless, dear lady," the Austrian was going on, "the eyes that I thought as beautiful as yours—I did not say more beautiful—were eyes that have long since been shut."

Muriel was now more piqued than before. Had the man been comparing her to a dead fiancÉe to whom he, living, remained faithful?

"Were they Austrian eyes?" she asked, her own eyes full of obtrusive indifference.

"No; they were Italian. Had you come to Europe three years ago, you would have seen them when you went to the Louvre. They were the eyes that have been given to the Mona Lisa."

Muriel and he were standing apart from the crowd of passengers that watched the unloading of the silver. The girl turned to her companion. Her glance was interested enough now, and she saw at once that his was serious.

"There is something that I have been wanting to tell you," she began, before she was well aware that she spoke—"something that I don't know exactly how to say, or whether I ought to say it at all."

Von Klausen was openly concerned.

"If you are in doubt," he replied, "perhaps it would be better if you first thought more about it."

But his opposition, though totally the reverse to what she had expected, clinched her resolve.

"No," she said. "I ought to tell you about it. Now that I have started I know I ought. It's—it's about that time in the fog."

Von Klausen's colour mounted. Then, politely, he pretended to forget the incident.

"Yes, don't you remember? You must remember."

"I remember. It was a very sudden fog."

"Well," she said, "it was about what happened then. I must speak to you—I must explain about that." She was holding tightly to the rail.

Von Klausen saw her wrists tremble. He made little of the subject.

"When you were frightened, and I took your hand to reassure you? Dear lady, I trust that you have not supposed that I acted on my presumption——"

"You're kind to put it that way," she interrupted. "You're generous. But I want to be honest. I have to be honest, because I want you to understand—because you must understand—just why I behaved as I did, and you wouldn't understand—you couldn't—if I weren't honest with you. Captain von Klausen, you didn't take my hand, and you know it. I took yours."

He raised the disputed hand; he raised it in protest.

"Mrs. Stainton, I assure you that it was I who——"

"No, it wasn't. And I wasn't frightened by the fog, either. You must remember that, from the way I spoke; I showed I didn't even realise what a fog means at sea. So how could I be afraid of it? You did know and you had just said that you were afraid of fogs. I took your hand. I did it before I thought——"

"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Stainton"—he was painfully anxious to end all this—"before you thought. It was nothing but a kindly——"

"Before I thought," she pursued, determinedly, her dark eyes steady on his. "You had told me of that awful experience of yours in the Bosphorus and of the effect it had on you. No wonder it did have such an effect. I am not blaming you for that. Only, I saw that you needed help and comfort. I was sorry for you. That was all: I was just sorry. I did it without thinking. I didn't know I had done it at all till it was all over. You see," she concluded, "I just couldn't, now, bear to have you misunderstand."

Carefully analysed, it might seem a contradictory explanation, but it was no sooner free of her lips than she felt that her soul was free of this thing which she had sought to explain.

Von Klausen was quite as much relieved as Muriel. He accepted it as she wished him to accept it.

"Never for a moment did I misunderstand," said he.

"Then," added Muriel, "you will understand why I haven't mentioned it to my husband——"

"Your husband?" The Austrian was all amazement. "Why should you?"

"Because," said Muriel, compressing her full lips and assuming her full height, "I always tell Jim everything."

If the shadow of a smile passed beneath his military moustache, she could not be sure of it.

"Everything?" said he. "But you have said that this was nothing."

"Exactly, and—don't you see?—that is one of the reasons why I haven't told it. You will—you will please not refer to it to him, Captain von Klausen, because——"

"Refer to it?" Von Klausen squared his shoulders. "To him? Never!"

His assertion was vehement.

"There is no reason why you shouldn't," Muriel replied; "only, as I say, I haven't told him, and the only real reason that I didn't tell him was because to do so I should have to tell him, too, that you had been afraid; and that isn't my secret: it's yours."

The Austrian's boyish face was now very grave.

"I thank you," he said. "For your thought of me I thank you, and the more I thank you because, by keeping my secret, you made it ours."

"Oh, but I don't mean——" said Muriel.

She did not finish, for she saw Stainton come from the writing-room and stride rapidly toward them. He had written his letter and despatched it.

Although the three stood shoulder to shoulder in the customs-shed at Cherbourg later in the day and occupied the same first-class compartment in the fast express through the rolling Norman country to Paris, Muriel and von Klausen were not then given an opportunity to conclude their conversation. The Austrian bade the Staintons good-bye in the swirl of porters and chauffeurs at the Gare St. Lazare, and Muriel took it for granted that the interruption must be final.