He had no mind to disturb her, yet he could not make her more comfortable without awaking her.
All he dared do was to unbutton her spats very cautiously, and slip off the little brown suede shoes.
Over her he laid the blankets from the bed, lightly, then opened wide the port.
His own toilet for the night was even simpler; he folded together the batch of damning papers, originals, his own notes, the forged passports, strapped them with an elastic band, buttoned them inside his breast pocket, reached over and extinguished the electric globe, and, fully dressed, lay down on the stripped bed in darkness.
They had been traveling sixteen hours. Allowing for their detention by the ill-omened Wyvern, they should dock at Amsterdam in five or six hours more.
He tried to sleep; but his nerves were very much alive and his excited brain refused to subscribe to the body's fatigue.
All that had happened since he first saw Karen Girard he now went over and over in his mind in spite of himself. He strove to stop thinking, and could not; and sometimes the lurid horror of the Wyvern possessed him with all its appalling details made plain to his imagination—details not visible from the liner's decks, yet perhaps the more ghastly because hidden by distance and by the infernal glare that fringed the doomed ship like a very nimbus from hell itself.
This obsessed him, and the villainous information which he had wrested from the papers which this young girl had been carrying—information amply sufficient to convict her and to make inevitable the military execution of the man Grätz and the grinning chauffeur, Bush.
And if the wretched maid, Anna, had been arrested with papers similar to these on her person, her case, too, was hopeless. Because the very existence of England depended upon extinguishing forever people who dealt in secret information like that which lay folded and buttoned under his belted coat of tweed.
He knew it, knew what his fate must have been had the satchel been searched on Fresh Wharf—knew what Karen's fate must have been, also, surely, surely!