She paused again, thinking harder and harder.

“We must take two places in the next mail steamer.  I must look after my husband, and you after your wife.”

CHAPTER XXV.

Mrs. Falcon’s bitter feeling against Dr. Staines did not subside; it merely went out of sight a little.  They were thrown together by potent circumstances, and in a manner connected by mutual obligations; so an open rupture seemed too unnatural.  Still Phoebe was a woman, and, blinded by her love for her husband, could not forgive the innocent cause of their present unhappy separation; though the fault lay entirely with Falcon.

Staines took her on board the steamer, and paid her every attention.  She was also civil to him; but it was a cold and constrained civility.

About a hundred miles from land the steamer stopped, and the passengers soon learned there was something wrong with her machinery.  In fact, after due consultation, the captain decided to put back.

This irritated and distressed Mrs. Falcon so that the captain, desirous to oblige her, hailed a fast schooner, that tacked across her bows, and gave Mrs. Falcon the option of going back with him, or going on in the schooner, with whose skipper he was acquainted.

Staines advised her on no account to trust to sails, when she could have steam with only a delay of four or five days; but she said, “Anything sooner than go back.  I can’t, I can’t on such an errand.”

Accordingly she was put on board the schooner, and Staines, after some hesitation, felt bound to accompany her.

It proved a sad error.  Contrary winds assailed them the very next day, and with such severity that they had repeatedly to lie to.

On one of these occasions, with a ship reeling under them like a restive horse, and the waves running mountains high, poor Phoebe’s terrors overmastered both her hostility and her reserve.  “Doctor,” said she, “I believe ’tis God’s will we shall never see England.  I must try and die more like a Christian than I have lived, forgiving all who have wronged me, and you, that have been my good friend and my worst enemy, but you did not mean it.  Sir, what has turned me against you so—­your wife was my husband’s sweetheart before he married me.”

“My wife your husband’s—­you are dreaming.”

“Nay, sir, once she came to my shop, and I saw directly I was nothing to him, and he owned it all to me; he had courted her, and she jilted him; so he said.  Why should he tell me a lie about that?  I’d lay my life ’tis true.  And now you have sent him to her your own self; and, at sight of her, I shall be nothing again.  Well, when this ship goes down, they can marry, and I hope he will be happy, happier than I can make him, that tried my best, God knows.”