What made it hardest for poor Carmelita was, perhaps, that fate had played her cruel pranks ever since the terrible moment of her act of renunciation. Thirty-six hours before, at the end of the dance in the great hotel parlors, Jack had proposed to her. For many days she had known what was coming, and what her answer must be, and she had given him no chance to see her alone. But Jack was Jack, and he had made his opportunity for himself, and had said his say under cover of the confusion at the end of the dance; and she had promised to give him his answer later, and she had given it, after a sleepless and tearful night; just a line to say that it could never, never be, and that he must not ask her again. And it had been done in such a commonplace, unromantic way that she hated to think of it--the meagre, insufficient little note handed to her maid to drop in the common letter-box of the hotel, and to lie there among bills and circulars and all sorts of silly every-day correspondence, until the hotel-clerk should take it out and put it in Jack’s box. She had passed through the office a little later, and her heart had sunk within her as she saw his morning’s mail waiting for him in its pigeon-hole, and thought what the opening of it would bring to him. But this was the least of her woe. Later came the fishing trip on the crowded cat-boat. She had fondly hoped that he would have the delicacy to excuse himself from that party of pleasure; but no, he was there, and doing just as she had asked him to, treating her as if nothing had happened, which was certainly the [Illustration] most exasperating thing he could have done. And then, to crown it all, they had been caught in a storm; and had not only been put in serious danger, which Carmelita did not mind at all, but had been tossed about until they were sore, and drenched with water, and driven into the stuffy little hole that was called a cabin, to choke and swelter and bump about in nauseated misery for two mortal hours, with the spray driving in through the gaping hatches; a dozen of them in all, packed together in there in the ill-smelling darkness. And so it was no wonder that, after a second night of utter misery, Miss Carmelita Billington felt so low in her nerves that she was quite unable to withhold her tears as she sat alone and thought of what lay behind her and before her.