He could do no more, and had indeed barely strength to stagger to his sleeping-quarters, which he discovered at last with some difficulty.  Here he flung himself down, dressed as he was, and lay like a log, for hours, not sleeping, but powerless to move hand or foot, and with his brain racked by torturing thoughts.  “As soon as I am able to stand again, I will see her father, and exact a reckoning from him,” he said to himself again and again, during those long dreary hours of prostration; but when the next day came, he was too weak to raise himself from his narrow bed, and on the next day after that he was no better.  The steward was much concerned by his feeble condition, especially as it was no common case of sea-sickness; for John Saltram had told him that he was never sea-sick.  He brought the prostrate traveller soda-water and brandy, and tried to tempt him to eat rich soups of a nutritious character; but the sick man would take nothing except an occasional draught of soda-water.

On the third day of the voyage the steward was very anxious to bring the ship’s surgeon to look at Mr. Saltram; but against this John Saltram resolutely set his face.

“For pity’s sake, don’t bore me with any more doctors!” he cried fretfully.  “I have had enough of that kind of thing.  The man can do nothing for me.  I am knocked up with over exertion and excitement—­that’s all; my strength will come back to me sooner or later if I lie quietly here.”

The steward gave way, for the time being, upon this appeal, and the surgeon was not summoned; but Mr. Saltram’s strength seemed very slow to return to him.  He could not sleep; he could only lie there listening to all the noises of the ship, the perpetual creaking and rattling, and tramping of footsteps above his head, and tortured by his impatience to be astir again.  He would not stand upon punctilio this time, he told himself; he would go straight to the door of Marian’s cabin, and stand there until she came out to him.  Was she not his wife—­his very own—­powerless to hold him at bay in this manner?  His strength did not come back to him; that wakeful prostration in which the brain was always busy, while the aching body lay still, did not appear to be a curative process.  In the course of that third night of the voyage John Saltram was delirious, much to the alarm of his fellow-passenger, the single sharer of his cabin, a nervous elderly gentleman, who objected to his illness altogether as an outrage upon himself, and was indignantly desirous to know whether it was contagious.

So the doctor was brought to the sick man early next morning whether he would or not, and went through the usual investigations, and promised to administer the usual sedatives, and assured the anxious passenger that Mr. Saltram’s complaint was in nowise infectious.

“He has evidently been suffering from serious illness lately, and has been over-exerting himself,” said the doctor; “that seems very clear.  We shall contrive to bring him round in a few days, I daresay, though he certainly has got into a very low state.”