"I can't—tonight," she gasped. "I am so tired—so tired that I can not look out the numbers. They would make me dizzy and—and—"
She ceased her excuses suddenly and flung herself in a chair beside the window, then seeing the moon, she arose and turned down the gas, opening the shutters that it might flood the room. She sat still feeling strangely warmed by the cold rays. She was looking backward through a little time, at that dark head upon the crest of the waves, risking life to save a crippled child whom he had never seen before. She was living through her own torture again with a curious, gentle thrill of ecstatic pleasure, and then her heart gave a great, wild throb as she saw him beside her upon the old pier, and—felt his wet, cold, but still impassioned, kiss upon her lips.
She hid her face as she remembered that—the face that had suddenly flushed there under the silent, never-betraying presence of the old moon, but, strangely enough, it was not with shame but thrilling, unacknowledged joy. There was a smile upon her mouth as she removed her hands, and putting out her hands swiftly, she caught the damp jacket from the back of the chair where Ahbel had hung it to dry, and pressed her lips again and again upon the place where his arm had touched.
And then an expression of wild dismay sprang to her eyes. The smile fled from her lips. A hoarse cry arose in her throat.
"It can't be—it can't be!" she moaned; "that what she said is true. My God! it can't be that a curse like that has been sent upon me!"
She paused breathlessly and suddenly, with the jacket still clasped in her hands, her eyes raised to the face of the moon; she went back further in memory, and saw herself lying upon the couch on the deck of the yacht, heard his softly murmured words as he repeated Percy Shelley's poem, felt the touch of his lips, warm and sweet upon her own again—and then, for the first time, understood it all.
All the desire for happiness that one day, all the wild longing to forget the past, all the breathless sweetness of those moments alone with him, the heavenly joy of that unrepulsed caress, the agony of terror when his life was threatened, the exquisite happiness that was almost pain when he was safe once more beside her, with his arms, wet and dripping about her—Dudley Maltby said she had offered five thousand dollars for his life. God! she would have given her whole fortune and have gone through life a beggar for every one of the after years, if they had numbered a thousand, to know that he was safe.
She laughed aloud, such a strange, unfathomable laugh, and staggered to her feet.
"Five thousand!" she cried, still laughing, though there were glistening tears in her eyes that seemed to blind her. "Five thousand! Let it go at once—at once! I will draw the check and send it to the captain of the 'Eolus,' to be filled in with the name of the man who did it. Five thousand! I wish it were every cent that I possess! I wish—"
She turned swiftly, excitedly, and turned up the gas, then as she would have approached her escritoire, her eye fell again upon the yellow telegram lying there like a sentinel.