Mrs. Travers gasped and with a wild little
laugh:
"Then you know why I called after King Tom last night."
He glanced away along his shoulder through the door of the deckhouse at
the growing brightness of the day. She did so, too. It was coming. It
had come! Another day! And it seemed to Mrs. Travers a worse calamity
than any discovery she had made in her life, than anything she could
have imagined to come to her. The very magnitude of horror steadied her,
seemed to calm her agitation as some kinds of fatal drugs do before they
kill. She laid a steady hand on Jorgenson's sleeve and spoke quietly,
distinctly, urgently.
"You were on deck. What I want to know is whether I was heard?"
"Yes," said Jorgenson, absently, "I heard you." Then, as if roused a
little, he added less mechanically: "The whole ship heard you."
Mrs. Travers asked herself whether perchance she had not simply
screamed. It had never occurred to her before that perhaps she had. At
the time it seemed to her she had no strength for more than a whisper.
Had she been really so loud? And the deadly chill, the night that had
gone by her had left in her body, vanished from her limbs, passed out of
her in a flush. Her face was turned away from the light, and that
fact gave her courage to continue. Moreover, the man before her was so
detached from the shames and prides and schemes of life that he seemed
not to count at all, except that somehow or other he managed at times to
catch the mere literal sense of the words addressed to him--and answer
them.
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