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.