For a long time she stood at the window, the moon looking down upon her and bathing her face in its radiance....  Insensibly then the earth recalled her and her thoughts began to return to the events of the day.

“Oh, yes,” she suddenly said to herself, “I knew there was something....  I wonder why the accountants stared at Burdon so....”

CHAPTER XXVIII

Far away, that same moon was watching another scene—­a ship on the Southern sea throbbing its way to New York.

It was a steamer just out of Rio, its drawing rooms and upper decks filled with tourists doubly happy because they were going home.

On the steerage deck below, in the apron of a kitchen worker, a man was standing with his elbows on the rail—­an uncertain figure in the moonlight.  Once when he turned to look at the deck above, a lamp shone upon him.  If you had been there you would have seen that while a beard covered much of his face, his cheeks were wasted and his eyes looked as though he needed rest.

He turned his glance out over the sea again, looking now to the north star and now to the roadway of ripples that led to the moon.

“I wonder if Rosa’s asleep,” he thought.  “Eleven o’clock.  She ought to be.  It’s a good school.  She’s lucky.  So was I, that the old gentleman didn’t get my letter....”

On the deck above, a violin and harp were accompanying a piano.

“That’s where I ought to be—­up there,” he thought, “not peeling potatoes and scouring pans down here.  All I have to do is to go up and announce myself....”  He smiled—­a grim affair.  “Yes, all I have to do is to go up and announce myself....  They’d take care of me, all right!”

He lifted his hand and thoughtfully rubbed his beard.

“As long as I stick to Russian, I’m safe.  Nicholas Rapieff—­nobody has suspected me now for fifteen years.  Paul Spencer’s dead—­dead long ago.  But, somehow or other, I have taken it into my head that I would like to see the place where he was born....”

His glance were on the ripples that led to the moon.

“I wonder if the orchard is still back of the house,” he thought, “and the winesap tree I fell out of.  I wonder if old Hutch is dead yet.  I remember he carried me in the house, and the very next week I knocked the clock down on him....  I wonder if that swimming hole is still there where the river turns below the dam.  That was the best of all....  I remember how I liked to lie there—­an innocent kid—­and dream what I was going to do when I was a man....  Lord in Heaven, what wouldn’t I give to dream those dreams again....”

On the upper deck the dance had come to an end.

“Time to turn in,” thought Paul.

He crossed to the steerage door and a moment later the moon was shining on an empty deck.

CHAPTER XXIX