At about nine o’clock that evening I went to my berth in the steerage, having spent the greater part of the day since the hour of lunch with Alice Lee and her mother. The girl’s cough had been somewhat troublesome during the afternoon. It had abated, but it had left her weak, and there had been a hint of querulousness in her manner, but scarcely so much as to vex her sweetness; nay, I could liken it to nothing better than to the passage of a summer breath of night-wind over some exquisitely calm breast of water, causing the reflection of the stars to tremble in the pure mirror, and shaking a little further sweetness yet out of the lilies. I helped her to undress, and saw her into bed, and I sat and read aloud to her until she fell asleep. Her mother had sat in an armchair watching her, until some one began to play on the piano, whilst I was reading to Alice, on which Mrs. Lee softly went out to silence the music, as I might suppose, for it presently ceased, and before she returned Alice had fallen asleep; whereupon, creeping from the berth, I whispered to Mrs. Lee that her daughter slumbered, and went to my own cabin. The bracket lamp was alight, but it burnt dimly, and I brightened it for the sake of the cheerfulness and the companionship of the flame. I was sad at heart, and my head ached, but I was not sleepy. Secretly I had been greatly agitated by what the gipsy had said. Of course I knew it was pure invention on the woman’s part; but even as mere suggestions her words had sunk deep. Could it be that I was a married woman? Could it be that I had children? The thought raised an agony of desire to _know_--to be _sure_; but it brought with it no other yearning. I knew not that there were dear ones at home mourning over me as dead, and therefore my heart could not crave for them. To my eclipsed and blackened mind my husband and my children were as the unborn infant is to the mother that may yet bear it. I was without memory and, no matter what might be the imaginations infixed in my mind by the suggestions and conjectures of others, I was without the power to realise. But not the less was the struggle after recollection a dreadful anguish. Sometimes I sat and sometimes I paced the deck of the cabin, and all the while I was saying to myself, ‘Suppose that I am a wife! Suppose that I have left a husband and children behind me at my home, wherever it may be!’ And then I would come to a stand, and fold my arms tightly across my breast, and close my eyes and with knitted brow search in the blackness within me, till the fruitless quest grew into physical pain unendurable as though some cruel hand were upon my heart.