of mind I often endeavored to analyze and define the novel feeling with which she inspired me—­a secret, subtle, but powerful attraction which constantly impelled me to seek her; but the attempt was hopeless.  I could only be sure that at least it was not love.  Having assured myself of this and being certain that she was quite as whole-hearted, I ventured one evening (I remember it was on the 3d of July) as we sat on deck to ask her, laughingly, if she could assist me to resolve my psychological doubt.

For a moment she was silent, with averted face, and I began to fear I had been extremely rude and indelicate; then she fixed her eyes gravely on my own.  In an instant my mind was dominated by as strange a fancy as ever entered human consciousness.  It seemed as if she were looking at me, not with, but through, those eyes—­from an immeasurable distance behind them—­and that a number of other persons, men, women and children, upon whose faces I caught strangely familiar evanescent expressions, clustered about her, struggling with gentle eagerness to look at me through the same orbs.  Ship, ocean, sky—­all had vanished.  I was conscious of nothing but the figures in this extraordinary and fantastic scene.  Then all at once darkness fell upon me, and anon from out of it, as to one who grows accustomed by degrees to a dimmer light, my former surroundings of deck and mast and cordage slowly resolved themselves.  Miss Harford had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her chair, apparently asleep, the book she had been reading open in her lap.  Impelled by surely I cannot say what motive, I glanced at the top of the page; it was a copy of that rare and curious work, “Denneker’s Meditations,” and the lady’s index finger rested on this passage: 

“To sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart from the body for a season; for, as concerning rills which would flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger, so there be certain of kin whose paths intersecting, their souls do bear company, the while their bodies go fore-appointed ways, unknowing.”

Miss Harford arose, shuddering; the sun had sunk below the horizon, but it was not cold.  There was not a breath of wind; there were no clouds in the sky, yet not a star was visible.  A hurried tramping sounded on the deck; the captain, summoned from below, joined the first officer, who stood looking at the barometer.  “Good God!” I heard him exclaim.

An hour later the form of Janette Harford, invisible in the darkness and spray, was torn from my grasp by the cruel vortex of the sinking ship, and I fainted in the cordage of the floating mast to which I had lashed myself.

It was by lamplight that I awoke.  I lay in a berth amid the familiar surroundings of the stateroom of a steamer.  On a couch opposite sat a man, half undressed for bed, reading a book.  I recognized the face of my friend Gordon Doyle, whom I had met in Liverpool on the day of my embarkation, when he was himself about to sail on the steamer City of Prague, on which he had urged me to accompany him.