At the bank Gerry drew out the balance of his current account. It amounted to something over two thousand dollars. He took most of it in Bank of England notes. Then he started home to pack, but before he reached the house a vision of the servants, flurried after helping their mistress off, commiserating him to one another, pitying him to his face perhaps, or, in the case of the old butler, suppressing a great emotion, was too much for him. He drove instead to a big department store, and in an hour had bought a complete outfit. He lunched at one of the quiet restaurants that divide down-town from up-town. He had avoided buying a ticket. As the _Gunter_ warped out, the purser came to him. “I understand you have no ticket.” “No,” said Gerry, drawing a roll of bills. “How much is the passage to Pernambuco?” The purser fidgeted. “This is irregular, sir,” he said. “Is it?” said Gerry, indifferently. “I have no ticket-forms,” said the purser, weakening. “I don’t want a ticket,” said Gerry. “I want a good room and three square meals a day.” Long, quiet days on a quiet sea are a master sedative to a troubled mind. Gerry had a great deal to think through. He sat by the hour with hands loosely clasped, his eyes far out on the ocean, tracing the course of his married life, and measuring the grounds for Alix’s arraignment. Gerry was just and generous to others’ faults, but not to his own. He had forgotten the sting of Alix’s words, and, to his growing amazement, saw in himself their justification. A time-server he certainly had been. The landfall of Pernambuco awoke him from reveries and introspection. He did not look upon this palm-strewn coast as a land of new beginnings; he sought merely a Lethean shore. The ship crawled in from an oily sea to the long strip of harbor behind the reef. Above, the sun blazed from a bowl of unbroken blue; on land, the multicolored houses spread like a rainbow under a dark cloud of brown-tiled roofs. Beyond the trees was a line of high, stuccoed houses, each painted a different color, all weather-stained, and some with rusted balconies that threatened to topple on to the passer-by. One bore the legend, “Hôtel d’Europe.” There Gerry installed himself. CHAPTER IX Between the hour of writing her note to Alan and the moment when she stepped on the train Alix had had no time to think. She was still driven by the impulse of anger that Gerry’s words had aroused. She did not reflect that the wound was only to her pride.