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But here occurred what he had dreaded most and probably thought he had escaped. She had stared at him, at the stewardess, at the walls, with abstracted, vacant, and bewildered, but always undimmed and unmoistened eyes. A sudden convulsion shook her whole frame, her blank expression broke like a shattered mirror, she threw her hands over her eyes and fell forward with her face to the back of her chair in an outburst of tears.

Alas for Jack! with the breaking up of those sealed fountains came her speech also, at first disconnected and incoherent, and then despairing and passionate. No! she had no longer friends or home! She had lost and disgraced them! She had disgraced HERSELF! There was no home for her but the grave. Why had Jack snatched her from it? Then, bit by bit, she yielded up her story,–a story decidedly commonplace to Jack, uninteresting, and even irritating to his fastidiousness. She was a schoolgirl (not even a convent girl, but the inmate of a Presbyterian female academy at Napa. Jack shuddered as he remembered to have once seen certain of the pupils walking with a teacher), and she lived with her married sister. She had seen Stratton while going to and fro on the San Francisco boat; she had exchanged notes with him, had met him secretly, and finally consented to elope with him to Sacramento, only to discover when the boat had left the wharf the real nature of his intentions. Jack listened with infinite weariness and inward chafing. He had read all this before in cheap novelettes, in the police reports, in the Sunday papers; he had heard a street preacher declaim against it, and warn young women of the serpent-like wiles of tempters of the Stratton variety. But even now Jack failed to recognize Stratton as a serpent, or indeed anything but a blundering cheat and clown, who had left his dirty ‘prentice work on his (Jack’s) hands. But the girl was helpless and, it seemed, homeless, all through a certain desperation of feeling which, in spite of her tears, he could not but respect. That momentary shadow of death had exalted her. He stroked his mustache, pulled down his white waistcoat and her cry, without saying anything. He did not know that this most objectionable phase of her misery was her salvation and his own.

But the stewardess would return in a moment. “You’d better tell me what to call you,” he said quietly. “I ought to know my niece’s first name.”

The girl caught her breath, and, between two sobs, said, “Sophonisba.”

Jack winced. It seemed only to need this last sentimental touch to complete the idiotic situation. “I’ll call you Sophy,” he said hurriedly and with an effort.

“And now look here! You are going in that cabin with Mrs. Johnson where she can look after you, but I can’t. So I’ll have to take your word, for I’m not going to give you away before Mrs. Johnson, that you won’t try that foolishness–you know what I mean–before I see you again. Can I trust you?”

With her head still bowed over the chair back, she murmured slowly somewhere from under her disheveled hair:–

“Yes.”

“Honest Injin?” adjured Jack gravely.

“Yes.”

The shuffling step of the stewardess was heard slowly approaching. “Yes,” continued Jack abruptly, lightly lifting his voice as Mrs. Johnson opened the door,–“yes, if you’d only had some of those spearmint drops of your aunt Rachel’s that she always gave you when these fits came on you’d have been all right inside of five minutes. Aunty was no slouch of a doctor, was she? Dear me, it only seems yesterday since I saw her. You were just playing round her knee like a kitten on the back porch. How time does fly! But here’s Mrs. Johnson coming to take you in. Now rouse up, Sophy, and just hook yourself on to Mrs. Johnson on that side, and we’ll toddle along.”