“Do you take your meals alone, Miss Burns?”

“Yes,” she said, somewhat taken aback at the abrupt question.  “Does that seem strange to you?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Frederick hastened to assure her.  “The astonished expression on my face was merely due to my stumbling and to this unexpected meeting with you.  The reason I inquired whether you eat alone was because I wanted to ask you if you had any objections to my lunching with you.”

“I should be very glad if you were to, Doctor von Kammacher.”

The stately couple attracted much attention from passers-by.  Frederick was tall and rather broad and carried himself well, and his hair and beard may have gone rather too long without the application of the shears.  Eva Burns was almost as tall.  She was a brunette, suggesting in her face and figure, which bore no resemblance to the wasp-like figures of the American women, a race and type more in accordance with the Titian ideal of feminine beauty.

“Would you mind waiting here a minute?” Frederick asked.  “You see those people over there getting into the car?  Some of them God in his inscrutable ways destined to be fellow-passengers of mine on the Roland, the others my rescuers.  I should not like to meet them again.”  When the little company was safely aboard the car on the way to Brooklyn, he said:  “I am profoundly grateful—­” and stopped.

“Because you were rescued from those men in the car?” Miss Burns laughed.

“No.  Because I met you, and you rescued me from them.  I admit I am ungrateful.  There’s that captain—­when I saw his ship come steaming toward us from across the waters and saw him standing on the bridge, he seemed to me to be an instrument of God, if not an archangel.  Awe-inspiring repose, solemn, awe-inspiring grandeur rested upon him.  He was not a man, he was the man, the saviour man, and beside him there was none.  My soul, all of our souls, clamoured for him, worshipped him.  But here he has dwindled into nothing but a good, commonplace little workman.  On the trip, Stoss’s liveliness was a relief.  Now, in the treadmill of his daily occupation, he has turned from the finer thoughts of his leisure moments.  Duty, while deepening Captain Butor and temporarily converting him into a useful, even an important personage, acts as a leveller on Stoss.  Stoss merely seemed to partake in the life on the sea, while in actuality concerned with nothing but himself.  And there’s my colleague, the ship’s surgeon.  I was completely upset to find what an empty vessel he is.  I really thought he was more interesting.”  As if sluices in his being had been opened wide, Frederick began to speak freely of the shipwreck, to which he had never before more than merely alluded.