She would go on deck. At the foot of the companionway she took heart of grace, breathing in gratefully the whiff of fresh air that came down to greet her. But half-way up she paused. What was that—that sound like the deep groundswell of the sea? Why, that must be the crowd—those people on the other side of the barrier and the ever-augmenting legions all along the water front. It was the sharp-featured youth, with the shifty little eyes, who had called her wish to check her baggage “a brilliant idear”; it was the drunken man who had shaken his little tired child; the woman with the white, white face; that other woman with the ear-rings, who hated anybody who went in front of her—all the people who had jostled and elbowed and tried to force her back. Soon they would be here, her daily companions. No escape. They were to become as familiar as people she had known all her life, as those home people who already seemed as far off as the dead folk are. But the home people weren’t dead; they were driving and dancing, and they had nothing more in common with Hildegarde Mar. She was henceforth to be companioned by that hungry crowd out there, with its vague murmuring, like the sea at Monterey. Dancing and merrymaking fell back into that far-off world that she had left so long ago, before she came all by herself to Seattle, all by herself was setting sail for Nome. Even when she reached the top of the companionway the noises on the wharf still sounded muffled for the most part and seemed to come from afar. But every now and then a single anger-sharpened note—or a cheer it might be—went up into the still air as startling as a rocket, and like a rocket seemed to burst in that higher region and come falling down to earth in a shower of sharp broken cries and strange, unnerving noises. She remembered the man who had set the child on his shoulder, and a woman with gray hair. She seemed to see them trampled under foot. The woman in the sealskin jacket looked on. Something menacing even in the muted cries, as though they presaged some mighty uprising of a trampled people. Had there been sounds like these abroad in Paris streets in the days of the Revolution? The solitary girl lent herself for a moment to that terror of the mob which dimly feels that no physical danger on the earth can match the peril you may stand in before the fury of the mass. Any single creature, however angry or debased, is a human being. But the mass!—the mass is a monster, and the monster was at the gate. Along the deserted deck she went, making hardly any noise, and listening with tense nerves. How strange for her to be in this place alone. Oh, Louis! Louis! and suddenly she had stopped. She was leaning her head against a stanchion, and the tears were running down her face. But very soon she was ashamed.