Jane Gerson, tossing on her pillows, heard the mellow bell of a clock somewhere in the dark and silent house strike three. This was the fifth time she had counted the measured strokes of that bell as she lay, wide-eyed, in the guest chamber's canopied bed. An eternity had passed since the dinner guests' departure. Her mind was racing like some engine gone wild, and sleep was impossible. Over and over again she had conned the events of the evening, always to come at the end against the impasse of General Crandall's blunt denial: "You shan't sail in the morning." In her extremity she had even considered flight by stealth--the scaling of walls perhaps, and a groping through dark streets to the wharf, there to smuggle herself somehow on a tender and so gain the _Saxonia_. But her precious gowns! They still reposed in their bulky hampers here in Government House; to escape and leave them behind would be worse than futile. The governor's fiat seemed absolute. Urged by the impulse of sheer necessity to be doing something--the bed had become a rack--the girl rose, lit a taper, and began to dress herself, moving noiselessly. She even packed her traveling bag to the last inch and locked it. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, hands helplessly folded in her lap. What to do next? Was she any better off dressed than thrashing in the bed? Her yearning called up a picture of the _Saxonia_, which must ere this be at her anchorage, since the consul said she was due at two. In three short hours tenders would puff alongside; a happy procession of refugees climb the gangway--among them the Shermans and Willy Kimball, bound for their Kewanee; the captain on the bridge would give an order; winches would puff, the anchor heave from the mud, the big boat's prow slowly turn westward--oceanward--toward New York! And she, a prisoner caught by the mischance of war's great mystery, would have to watch that diminishing column of smoke fade against the morning's blue--disappear. Inspiration seized her. It would be something just to see the _Saxonia_, now lying amid the grim monsters of the war fleet. From the balcony of the library, just outside the door of her room, she could search the darkness of the harbor for the prickly rows of lights marking the merchant ship from her darker neighbors. The general's marine glasses lay on his desk, she remembered. To steal out to the balcony, sweep the harbor with the glasses, and at last hit on the ship of deliverance--for all but her; to do this would be better than counting the hours alone. She softly opened the door of her room. Beyond lay the dim distances of the library, suddenly become vast as an amphitheater; in the thin light filtering through the curtains screening the balcony appeared the lumpy masses of furniture and vague outlines of walls and doors. She closed the door behind her, and stood trembling; this was somehow like burglary, she felt--at least it had the thrill of burglary.