With her nerves overwrought and her senses reeling, she sought her berth. There she argued with herself that the man who had spoken to the purser must be mistaken. It was not true, she persisted in thinking. The man whom the steamship agency manager had told her was Captain Whitridge—the man who had given up his room to her—could not be Lavelle. His was not a face that could mask such a fiend. It was too fine and yet the sadness of it—the pain she had seen in his eyes—returned to startle her.

"I can't! I won't believe it!" she said to herself over and over again, fighting the sense of foreboding that grew in her heart.

But dinner time brought a brutal confirmation. A passenger at the captain's table where Emily Granville sat blurted out, before the skipper could stop him, how the Cambodia's first officer had seen the man called Whitridge come aboard and had recognized him as Lavelle. He pointed him out, sitting with bent head, at a table across the saloon.

With white face and scared, staring eyes Emily Granville left her place. Somehow she got to her room. A little while later her maid found her senseless in her berth and revived her only to hear her cry and moan that furies—black furies—were tearing at her pillow. And she breathed heavily as one spent from swimming.

Before the Cambodia had dropped Mera Head behind the horizon the loss of the Alaskan liner Yakutat had been dragged out of its ten-year past and gossiped from one end of the ship to the other. What details proved elusive were blithely manufactured into the fabric of a sea disaster which had shocked the world and made a nation ashamed. Men shook their heads ominously and women shuddered as the fact passed from mouth to mouth that Lavelle, the Yakutat's second officer, who had beaten drowning passengers with an oar, was among them. When it became known that Emily Granville, whose parents had been driven away from Lavelle's boat, was also in the Cambodia and lying ill in her room from the shock of knowing that Lavelle was a fellow-passenger, a tenseness came upon things that made the nerves of the liner's officers raw.

Paul Lavelle did not enter the dining saloon after that first night. It became known that he took his meals in his room and left it only after darkness fell. Watch officers saw him from the bridge now and then—a shadow in the night.

"Wandering around like a pariah dog," one of them told a passenger. Often they saw "The Shadow" as late as dawn.

But this night—it was the 

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