Mrs. Locke was not there at all events. As Hildegarde turned away from the noisome-smelling place a well-dressed woman of about forty, who had been leaning on the piano (undisturbed, apparently, by the highly abnormal sounds it gave forth), followed Miss Mar to ask: “How is the sick lady in your room?” Miss Mar knew her interlocutor to be Mrs. David M. Jones, but they had not spoken before. “There are two still sick,” Hildegarde answered. “I mean the one they’re afraid’s got smallpox?” Miss Mar opened her wide eyes very wide indeed. Even Louis had never thought of that chance. “I hadn’t heard about it,” she said. And presently, “Do you know where Mrs. Locke is?” “I think she’s gone to get the doctor,” answered the ex-governor’s wife. “I had meant to be in the room you and she are in. Pretty satisfied now to be out of it.” With which she returned to the festive scene. Even Hildegarde, who was so little nervous, would ordinarily have found her self-possession shaken by the news that she had been sleeping for nearly a week within two feet of so contagious and foul a disease; but she took the information more quietly than can well be credited by any one who has never cut the ties that bind us to resourceful yet care-filled civilized life. Those who have once severed the thousand threads find not only some hardship and heartsoreness, but certain natures find, too, the larger calm that only perfect acquiescence gives. It is not all loss to be unable to run from danger. You gain a curious new sense of the inevitableness that lies at the roots of life, a sense smothered in the country and forgotten in the town. And this calm that walks the perilous places of our earth with its front of untroubled dignity and its steadfast eyes, this gain amongst many losses was not denied the girl faring North for knowledge and for old devotion’s sake. “Yes,” the steward said, Mrs. Locke was in her cabin. As she went toward it, Hildegarde wondered if it were written among the things to be that she herself should die there, and would Louis be hearing one day how they’d buried her in Bering Sea. She opened the door, and there was the object of her quest looking on at a strange and sufficiently horrible spectacle. Stretched full length upon the floor, in her nightgown, lay the Dutch woman speechless, with a face swollen and scarlet. The ship’s doctor, standing astride of her huge hulk, bent over and peering under the heavy eyelid, which he had forced back with his thumb, looked into the rolled-up eye. Hildegarde, with noiseless lips, made the question, “Smallpox?” Mrs. Locke answered, in a low voice, “Smallpox! No. Lack of self-control.” How this worked out Hildegarde did not wait to inquire. It was too ugly to see that big woman lying there under such conditions, and the place smelt of alcohol.