Later.  My husband is helpless, and Herbert has been with me, urging me passionately to trust myself to him in a little boat at midnight.  He says there are several ships in sight, and one of them will be almost sure to pick us up.  He swears that he will leave me, and never see me again (if I say so), so soon as he has placed me in safety, but he will save me, by force if need be, from the brute into whose hands I fell so innocently.  If the ship does not see us, it is but dying, after all.

Good-bye, mother!  I pray that this paper will reach you before Captain Eliot can send you his own account, but if it does not, you will believe me innocent all the same.

This was the last, and I folded up the papers as they had come to me.  That night I read them all to Pedro.

“They was drownded—­I knew it,” said Pedro; and nothing could remove that opinion.  A ghost is more convincing than logic.

Our voyage wore on, with one day just like another:  my brother looked at the sun every day, and put down a few cabalistic figures on a slate, but his steady business was reading novels to his wife and drinking weak claret and water.

The sea was always the same, smiling and smooth, and the “man at the wheel” seemed to be always holding us back by main strength from the place where we wanted to go.  I had a growing belief that we should sail for ever on this rippling mirror and never touch the frame of it.  It struck me with a sense of intense surprise when a dark line loomed far ahead, and they told me quietly that that line meant Bombay.

It seemed a matter of course to my brother that the desired port should heave in sight just when he expected it, but to me the efforts that he had made to accomplish this tremendous result were ridiculously small.

“I have done more work in a week, and had nothing to show for it at last,” said I, “than you have seemed to do in all this voyage.”

“Poor sister! don’t you wish you were a man?”

“Certainly, all women do who have any sense.  I hold with that ancient Father of the Church who maintained that all women are changed into men on the judgment-day.  The council said it was heresy, but that don’t alter my faith.”

“I shouldn’t like you half as well if you had been born a boy,” said Frank.

“But I should like myself vastly better,” said I, clinging to the last word.

Bombay is a city by itself:  there is none like it on earth, whatever there may be in the heaven above or in the waters under it.  From Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy’s hospital for sick animals to the Olympian conceit of the English residents, there are infinite variations of people and things that I am persuaded can be matched nowhere else.  I felt myself living in a series of pictures, a sort of supernumerary in a theatre, where they changed the play every night.

One of the first who boarded our ship was Mr. Rayne, an old friend of Frank’s.  He insisted on our going to his house for a few days in a warm-hearted way that was irresistible.