Then Barker called and was admitted, Miss Skeat being present, and his face expressed a whole volume of apology, while he talked briskly of current topics; and so he gradually regained the footing he had lost.  At all events he thought so, not knowing that though Margaret might forgive she could never forget; and that she was now forewarned and forearmed in perpetuity against any advance Barker might ever make.

One day the mail brought a large envelope with an English postage stamp, addressed in a strong, masculine hand, even and regular, and utterly without adornment, but yet of a strikingly peculiar expression, if a handwriting may be said to have an expression.

     “CUNARD S.S. Servia, Sept. 15th.

“My Beloved Lady—­Were it not for the possibility of writing to you, this voyage would be an impossible task to me; and even as it is, the feeling that what I write must travel away from you for many days before it travels towards you again makes me half suspect it is a mockery after all.  After these wonderful months of converse it seems incredible that I should be thus taken out of your hearing and out of the power of seeing you.  That I long for a sight of your dear face, that I hunger for your touch and for your sweet voice, I need not tell you or further asseverate.  I am constantly looking curiously at the passengers, vainly thinking that you must appear among them.  The sea without you is not the sea, any more than heaven would be heaven were you not there.

“I cannot describe to you, my dear lady, how detestable the life on board is to me.  I loathe the people with their inane chatter, and the idiotic children, and the highly-correct and gentlemanly captain, all equally.  The philistine father, the sea-sick mother, the highly-cultured daughter, and the pipe-smoking son, are equally objects of disgust.  When I go on deck the little children make a circle round me, because I am so big, and the sailors will not let me go on to forecastle under three shillings—­which I paid cheerfully, however, because I can be alone there and think of you, without being contemplated as an object of wonder by about two hundred idiots.  I have managed to rig a sort of table in my cabin at last, and here I sit, under the dubious light of the port-hole, wishing it would blow, or that we might meet an iceberg, or anything, to scare the people into their dens and leave me a little open-air solitude.

“It seems so strange to be writing to you.  I never wrote anything but little notes in the old days at Baden, and now I am writing what promises to be a long letter, for we cannot be in under six days, and in all that time there is nothing else I can do—­nothing else I would do, if I could.  And yet it is so different.  Perhaps I am incoherent, and you will say, different from what?  It is different from what it used to be, before that thrice-blessed afternoon in the Newport fog.