there it was.  In short an hour had passed and the young lady was not accounted for:  from which I might judge if she ever would be.  The watch couldn’t account for her, but no doubt the fishes in the sea could—­poor miserable pitiful lady!  The stewardess and he had of course thought it their duty to speak at once to the Doctor, and the Doctor had spoken immediately to the Captain.  The Captain didn’t like it—­they never did, but he’d try to keep it quiet—­they always did.

By the time I succeeded in pulling myself together and getting on, after a fashion, the rest of my clothes I had learned that Mrs. Nettlepoint wouldn’t yet have been told, unless the stewardess had broken it to her within the previous few minutes.  Her son knew, the young gentleman on the other side of the ship—­he had the other steward; my man had seen him come out of his cabin and rush above, just before he came in to me.  He had gone above, my man was sure; he hadn’t gone to the old lady’s cabin.  I catch again the sense of my dreadfully seeing something at that moment, catch the wild flash, under the steward’s words, of Jasper Nettlepoint leaping, with a mad compunction in his young agility, over the side of the ship.  I hasten to add, however, that no such incident was destined to contribute its horror to poor Grace Mavis’s unwitnessed and unlighted tragic act.  What followed was miserable enough, but I can only glance at it.  When I got to Mrs. Nettlepoint’s door she was there with a shawl about her; the stewardess had just told her and she was dashing out to come to me.  I made her go back—­I said I would go for Jasper.  I went for him but I missed him, partly no doubt because it was really at first the Captain I was after.  I found this personage and found him highly scandalised, but he gave me no hope that we were in error, and his displeasure, expressed with seamanlike strength, was a definite settlement of the question.  From the deck, where I merely turned round and looked, I saw the light of another summer day, the coast of Ireland green and near and the sea of a more charming colour than it had shown at all.  When I came below again Jasper had passed back; he had gone to his cabin and his mother had joined him there.  He remained there till we reached Liverpool—­I never saw him.  His mother, after a little, at his request, left him alone.  All the world went above to look at the land and chatter about our tragedy, but the poor lady spent the day, dismally enough, in her room.  It seemed to me, the dreadful day, intolerably long; I was thinking so of vague, of inconceivable yet inevitable Porterfield, and of my having to face him somehow on the morrow.  Now of course I knew why she had asked me if I should recognise him; she had delegated to me mentally a certain pleasant office.  I gave Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Gotch a wide berth—­I couldn’t talk to them.  I could, or at least I did a little, to Mrs. Nettlepoint, but with too many reserves for comfort on either side, since