She took up a brown package, tied up with string, which lay in a corner of the drawer.

"I don't know," said Rames with a puzzled face. "I have forgotten."

"May I open it?"

"Of course."

Cynthia cut the string and, one after another, perhaps a score of brown telegraph envelopes slipped out in a cascade and fell upon the table in front of her.

"Telegrams," she said curiously. "Unopened, too! Oh, Harry!" this with a mocking laugh of reproach. Then she looked at the address of one of the telegrams. It ran:

Rames,

S. S. Perhaps,

Tilbury Docks.

As she read her face changed. There came a look of introspection in her dark, wide-open eyes. She swept back in her thoughts over the course of years and took note of the irony of things and of the surprising changes in a life like hers which, to all the world, was uneventful and prescribed.