"Diana!" she cried.
The other girl stood stock still. Her face showed ghostly in the greyness. She peered at April, clutching at her arm and whispering:
"For God's sake take me to your cabin!"
They crept down the deck like a pair of thieves, hardly breathing till they were behind the locked door. Without looking at her, April saw that there was trouble to meet. She remembered the faces of the other women, and the instinct to protect a fellow-creature against the mob rose in her.
"Tell me what it is. I'll help you fight it out."
But Diana had flung herself down with a defiant air on the sofa.
"Don't you know? Weren't you one of the hounds on my track?" she demanded, in a high-pitched whisper. April looked at her steadily.
"The whole thing is an absolute mystery to me. I know nothing except that first you were missing, and then apparently they found you——"
"Yes; in Geoffrey Bellew's cabin!"
The April fool had, indeed, surpassed herself! April blenched, but she took the blow standing. After all, she had been as great a fool as the girl sitting there, for she, too, had handed over her good name into the careless hands of another; had sold her reputation for a song—a song that had lasted seventeen days, but seemed now in the act of becoming a dirge.