“As I near the land,” she wrote, “I feel a sort of excitement.  Several times to-day I have recalled so distinctly the picture of Rosy as I saw her last, when we all stood crowded upon the wharf at New York to see her off.  She and Nigel were leaning upon the rail of the upper deck.  She looked such a delicate, airy little creature, quite like a pretty schoolgirl with tears in her eyes.  She was laughing and crying at the same time, and kissing both her hands to us again and again.  I was crying passionately myself, though I tried to conceal the fact, and I remember that each time I looked from Rosy to Nigel’s heavy face the poignancy of my anguish made me break forth again.  I wonder if it was because I was a child, that he looked such a contemptuous brute, even when he pretended to smile.  It is twelve years since then.  I wonder—­how I wonder, what I shall find.”

She stopped writing and sat a few moments, her chin upon her hand, thinking.  Suddenly she sprang to her feet in alarm.  The stillness of the night was broken by wild shouts, a running of feet outside, a tumult of mingled sounds and motion, a dash and rush of surging water, a strange thumping and straining of engines, and a moment later she was hurled from one side of her stateroom to the other by a crashing shock which seemed to heave the ship out of the sea, shuddering as if the end of all things had come.

It was so sudden and horrible a thing that, though she had only been flung upon a pile of rugs and cushions and was unhurt, she felt as if she had been struck on the head and plunged into wild delirium.  Above the sound of the dashing and rocking waves, the straining and roaring of hacking engines and the pandemonium of voices rose from one end of the ship to the other, one wild, despairing, long-drawn shriek of women and children.  Bettina turned sick at the mad terror in it—­the insensate, awful horror.

“Something has run into us!” she gasped, getting up with her heart leaping in her throat.

She could hear the Worthingtons’ tempest of terrified confusion through the partitions between them, and she remembered afterwards that in the space of two or three seconds, and in the midst of their clamour, a hundred incongruous thoughts leaped through her brain.  Perhaps they were this moment going down.  Now she knew what it was like!  This thing she had read of in newspapers!  Now she was going down in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel!  And, as she sprang to clutch her fur coat, there flashed before her mental vision a gruesome picture of the headlines in the newspapers and the inevitable reference to the millions she represented.

“I must keep calm,” she heard herself say, as she fastened the long coat, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering.  “Poor Daddy—­poor Daddy!”

Maddening new sounds were all about her, sounds of water dashing and churning, sounds of voices bellowing out commands, straining and leaping sounds of the engines.  What was it—­what was it?  She must at least find out.  Everybody was going mad in the staterooms, the stewards were rushing about, trying to quiet people, their own voices shaking and breaking into cracked notes.  If the worst had happened, everyone would be fighting for life in a few minutes.  Out on deck she must get and find out for herself what the worst was.