She was incapable of reasoned
reflection. A series of mental pictures, a startling jumble of
ideas--trivial as the wish to save the clothes from a wetting,
tremendous as the near prospect of eternity--danced through her brain
with bewildering clearness. She felt that if she were fated to live to
a ripe old age she would never forget a single detail of the furniture
and decorations of the room. She would hear forever the dolorous
howling of the gale, the thumping of the waves against the quivering
plates, the rapid, methodic thud of the donkey-engine, which, long
since deserted by its cowardly attendant, was faithfully doing its work
and flooding the ship with electric light.
She could scarcely believe that it was she, Elsie Maxwell, who stood
there on the tremulous island of the ship amidst a stormy ocean the
like of which she had never seen before. She seemed to possess an
entity apart from herself, to be a passive witness of events as in a
dream; presently, she would awake and find that she was back in her
pleasant room at the Morrisons' hacienda, or tucked up in her own
comfortable cabin.
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