These three words said it all. Jane dropped her face in her soaked and wrinkled fingers. The damp clothes flapped persistently about her neat, brown head, as if trying to arouse her with the useless diversion of things that one is quite used to. Jane thought of Ben Trawl, it is true, but without any distinct sense of disloyalty or remorse. She experienced the ancient and always inexplicable emotion not peculiar to Jane: she might have lived on in relative content, not in the least disturbed by any consciousness of her own ties, as long as the calm eyes she worshiped reflected the image of no other woman. Now something in Jane’s heart seemed to snap and let lava through. Oh, purple and gold, gall and wormwood, beauty and daintiness, heart-ache and fear! Had the Queen come to the palace of Kubla Khan? Let Alph, the sacred river, run! Who was she, Jane Granite, that she should stem the sweeping current? “... Crying _again_? This is a nice way to greet a fellar,” said roughly a sudden voice in Jane’s dulled ear. Ben Trawl lifted the damp clothes, strode through between the poles, and stood beside his promised wife. His face was ominously dark. XIV. It is not so hard to endure suffering as to resist ease. The passion for martyrdom sweeps everything before it, as long as it is challenged by no stronger force. Emanuel Bayard had lived for a year upon the elixir of a spiritual exaltation such as has carried men to a glowing death, or through a tortured life without a throb of weakness. He had yet to adjust his nature to the antidote of common human comfort. Like most of the subtler experiences of life, this came so naturally that, at first, he scarcely knew it by sight or name. It was not a noteworthy matter to show the courtesies of civilized life to the family of his old Professor. Bayard reminded himself of this as he walked down the Point. It was quite a week before he found leisure to attend to this simple, social obligation. His duties in Angel Alley had been many and laborious; it did not occur to him to shorten a service or an entertainment; to omit a visit to the wharves when the crews came in, or to put by the emergency of a drunkard’s wife to a more convenient season because he had in view that which had grown so rare to the young man, now--the experience of a personal luxury. Like a much older and more ascetic man than he was, he counted the beads on his rosary of labors conscientiously through. Then he hurried to her. Now, to women of leisure nothing is so incomprehensible as the preoccupation of a seriously busy man. Bayard had not counted upon this feminine fact: indeed, he lived in a world where feminine whim was an element as much outside his calculation as the spring fashions of the planet Uranus. He was quite at a loss when Miss Carruth received him distantly.