Early the next morning Lady Victoria told her brother what had been the effect of his note.  He was very angry with himself for not having put it into better shape, and he determined to repair his error by devoting himself entirely to watching for the steamer.  With this object, he went down to the Cunard office and established himself with a novel and a box of cigarettes, to pass the day.  He refused to move, and sent out in the afternoon for something to eat.  The people in the office did not know him, and he felt free to be as Bohemian as he pleased.  Once in the course of the day he was told that a French steamer had come in and had met with very heavy weather, losing a boat or two.  It was possible, they said, that the Cunarder, which had sailed on the day following this vessel’s departure, though from a nearer point, might be delayed another twenty-four hours.  For his part, he felt no fear of the safe arrival of the ship, in due time.  The odds are a thousand to one that a company which has never lost a vessel at sea will not lose any particular one you name.  Nevertheless, he arranged to be called up in the night, if her lights were sighted, and he returned somewhat disconsolately to the hotel.  Again he bethought him that if he told the Countess he had passed the day in the steamer office she would overrate his anxiety and so increase her own.

Margaret was really very unreasonable.  There was not the slightest doubt that the steamer was safe, but she had become possessed, as Lady Victoria expressed it, by this unaccountable presentiment, that her fair-haired lover was gone from her for ever.  Hideous things came up before her, poor drowned faces in the green swirl of the waves, men dead, and dying men grasping frantically at the white water-crests breaking over them, as though the rushing foam were a firm thing and could save them.  She heard the wild thin wind screeching across the ocean furrows, breathless in his race with death.  And then all seemed quiet, and she could see a grand form of a man, stiff-limbed and stark, the yellow hair all hanging down and the broad white throat turned up in death, floating solemnly through the deep green water, and seaweed, and ooze, far down below the angry waves.

She struggled hard against these dark thoughts; but it was no use.  They would come back, and all through the evening she sat by her fire, with eyes wide, and parted lips, staring at the embers and straining her hearing to catch the sound of some one coming to the door—­some one bearing the welcome news that the good ship was sighted at last.  But no sound came, all through that weary evening, nor any message of comfort.  Lady Victoria sat with her, and Miss Skeat, pretending not to notice her distressed mood; and once or twice the Duke came in and spoke cheerfully of what they would do “when Claudius came back.”  But Margaret went to her room at last with a heavy heart, and would not be comforted.