Comparative peace had endured, with only an occasional restless interval, until the sight of the Bookstalls boy had filled him with inexplicable dread. His condition when she returned from her fourth journey to Bookstalls was such that she determined not to go again. One of two results was inevitable if this devouring tension was not speedily relaxed--utter insanity or swift death. One more circumstance in this connection intensified the mystery, even though it gave her gladness--her father’s toast to the outcast, the toast that was drunk alone. He was without that poisonous personal hatred which the others manifested toward Routledge. All these thoughts had worn grooves in her mind from much passing, but they did not evolve her father’s shame. Throughout the week, the correspondents had dropped in by twos and threes to bid them good-by. Negotiations were at a dead-lock, and the London dailies wanted their men on the spot for eventualities. Most of the men were going west to the Far East--the twenty-five day route, via America. Some one, however, mentioned Suez, and the name was on Jerry Cardinegh’s lips for an entire afternoon. At dinner his idea broke into words: “Come, deere, we must pack to-night. We’re off to-morrow for Japan on the P. & O. liner, _Carthusian_. We can smell the ruction in Japan--and it’s a good place to live. London--aye, God, the old town is murdering me!” She had thought of it many times, but until last week her father had been happy in Cheer Street, entirely immune to the war ferment. Noreen understood what had turned London into an iron pressure--one little boy, lost in din and fog and multitudes. She was glad to go away. The first few days at sea helped her father, but the improvement did not last. They travelled very leisurely, sometimes stopping over a ship in different ports. It was with a quickened heart that the woman saw the Indian coast again after several years. Routledge was intricately identified with the India of her mind now, and she knew that somewhere in India he was living out his exile. Always in those days and nights of watching and labor with the sleepless old man who was leaving her hourly, with the accelerated speed of a river that nears its falls, she was thrilled with the hope that Bombay or Madras or Calcutta would give her some living word of the outcast. She hardly hoped to see Routledge; but with a triple hunger she yearned to hear that he lived, even to hear his name uttered by some one in whom the mystery had inspired hatred.... But the Indian ports furnished nothing concerning Routledge. They revived, however (and in her maturity), the half-formed impressions of her girlhood on the Anglo-Indians and their life. To observe and despise certain aspects of the ruling people was as certain a heritage from her father as was that fairer evolution of the spirit with which she had been blest by some elder lineage.