“This business,” he said, leaving his original subject and dropping a few highly flavoured oaths, “is going to cost me one thousand American dollars.  I shall not be able to keep the first days of my engagement in New York.”  In good English he cursed the whole German Hansa, especially the Hamburg.  “The wretched little herring keg!  At the utmost it doesn’t make more than ten knots an hour.”

Fourteen hours of peaceful sleep brought the painter, Jacob Fleischmann of Fuerth to his senses.  He had his breakfast served in bed, rang the call-bell, gave orders, and kept the steward dancing attendance on him.  The others could hear him loudly reiterate again and again that though the loss of his oil-paintings, sketches, and etchings, which he had intended to sell in America, was irreparable and beyond compensation, yet the steamship company was unquestionably liable, and as soon as he reached New York, he would take to haunting the company’s office, until they paid him full damages.  They were to find out who and what he was.

Rosa, happy and eager, though with eyes red from crying, passed to and fro between her mistress’s cabin and the dining-room table, carrying now one thing, now another, to Mrs. Liebling, who was still whining reproachfully.  It had been agreed to keep Siegfried Liebling’s death a secret from her, an easy thing to do since she had declared she was not yet strong enough to see the children.  Yet it was remarkable how the dead woman had revived.  When Frederick after breakfast paid her a professional visit, he found she had only a dim recollection of having been unconscious.  She had had glorious dreams, she said, and when she realised she was to be awakened, had felt so regretful that she tried to resist the summons back to earthly life, back from the wondrous isle, the veritable paradise, in which she had been.

Mrs. Liebling was beautiful.  She complained of pains, and at Frederick’s bidding bared her body.  He found it marked with blue spots, the result of the rough tossings in the life-boat, which had left him, too, bruised and wounded in various places and with frozen toes and fingers.

“My dear Mrs. Liebling,” he said, “put up with your slight discomfort.  We were all dead, and we have undeservedly been granted a second life.”

Shortly before ten o’clock, Captain Butor entered the dining-room, shook hands with the gentlemen, asked how they had slept, and told them that all night the men on the bridge had redoubled their vigilance on the chance of discovering more survivors of the Roland.  Since the wind was still from the northwest, it was possible that the Hamburg might chance on the wreck, in case it had not sunk.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we did sight a derelict at one o’clock, but there were absolutely no persons aboard.  It was an older wreck and a sailing vessel, not a steamer.”

“Perhaps it was the Roland’s murderer,” said Doctor Wilhelm.