Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there were numbers of people lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes of talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were others reading “Lothair,” a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very fashionable book indeed.  There was in the air that odor of paint and carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of the chandeliers ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious feeling of coziness and security to our travellers.

A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot’s bell signaling the engineer to slow the boat.  There was a moment of perfect silence; then all the drops of the chandeliers in the saloon clashed musically together; then fell another silence; and at last came wild cries for help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses.  “Send out a boat!” “There was a woman aboard that steamboat!” “Lower your boats!” “Run a craft right down, with your big boat!” “Send out a boat and pick up the crew!” The cries rose and sank, and finally ceased; through the lattice of the state-room window some lights shone faintly on the water at a distance.

“Wait here, Isabel!” said her husband.  “We’ve run down a boat.  We don’t seem hurt; but I’ll go see.  I’ll be back in a minute.”

Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a world wildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it was the fashion for ladies to wear their hair down their backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to speak to each other without introduction.  The place with which she had felt so familiar a little while before was now utterly estranged.  There was no motion of the boat, and in the momentary suspense a quiet prevailed, in which those grotesque shapes of disarray crept noiselessly round whispering panic-stricken conjectures.  There was no rushing to and fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there was not a man to be seen, for apparently they had all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the calamity.  A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it was such a topsy-turvy world that it would have seemed only another dream-land, but that it was marked for reality by one signal fact.  With the rest appeared the woman in bridal white and the woman in widow’s black, and there, amidst the fright that made all others friends, and for aught that most knew, in the presence of death itself, these two moved together shunned and friendless.

Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had become known to Isabel and the rest that their own steamer had suffered no harm, but that she had struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of canal boats, from which those alarming cries and curses had come.  The steamer was now lying by for the small boats she had sent out to pick up the crew of the sunken vessel.

“Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chandeliers,” said one of the ladies.  “Is it such a very alight matter to run down another boat and sink it?”