One minute he spent in deft examination of the injured ankle, then bandaged it. Afterward, he left the girl, and went up on deck, where he stood staring through long minutes toward the fleecy masses of cumulus clouds that lay along the New Jersey horizon.
CHAPTER V
A Prisoner of Morphia
It was mid-forenoon of the following day when Ethel awoke from the profound sleep superinduced by the drug. It was with a vast astonishment that her startled eyes took in the surroundings of the stateroom. There was a blank wall straight opposite her widely gazing eyes, where should have stood a dressing table of Circassian walnut, topped by the long oval mirror always ready to show her the reflected loveliness of her face. And there should have been also lying exposed on the polished surface of the table an orderly and beautiful array of those things that make for a woman's beauty—the creams that cleanse a skin too delicate for the harsh water poured from city mains; in a gold-topped bottle a lotion for the hair, delicate and effective; in dainty phials essences of perfume, subtle, yet curiously pervasive, with the fragrance of joyous springtime. Indeed, a medley of the arts evolved through the ages for the perfecting of that beauty, which, after all, is God-given—a thing not to be attained by the processes of even the most skilled beauty-doctors....
But Ethel possessed the thing itself. To her the accessories were but absurdities—unnecessary and wanton, means whereby to emphasize a natural loveliness.
There should have been a glimmer of pure white light from the back of a hair brush, lying on the dressing table. Ethel had loved the purity of that ivory surface. She had loved it so much that she refused to have it broken by the superimposition upon it of initials wrought cleverly in silver or gold or platinum. That brush meant so much to her! Night by night, she toiled with it. After she had undone the masses of her bronze-gold hair, she worked over them, with a sybaritical, meticulous care.
She was used to sitting in negligée and having her maid brush the strands. That brushing made the hair resplendent.... Now, Ethel looked—there was no dressing table—no mirror—nothing, of the sort that she was accustomed to see when she awoke in the morning.
She thought again of her own bedroom at home. She was minded to take her bath, which must be drawn and waiting.... And then, suddenly, that blank wall there before her eyes hammered upon her consciousness.
She was stricken with a curious sense of horror in this instant of realization that she was in some unknown place—absolutely apart from the dear, familiar things of home.