The officer laughed. “Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,” he explained. “The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself.” He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: “If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?” She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of a smile. He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home, then made her a punctilious salute and went his way. Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her folded arms. After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at the fog-belt out of frightened eyes. And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon’s phantom in the sky. Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above. A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south. But no more “Chinese day-fireworks” rose out of it. And at length she summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there, half senseless, huddled on her bed. When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised soul had touched all depths. But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage, terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary, alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly ready to fight for bodily existence. That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also. That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow. Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord. Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick. With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and clutched at the pistol under her pillow. “Sanang!” she cried in a terrible voice. “Keuke Mongol!” he said, smilingly.