“Oh, thank you—­thank you,” she murmured.  “And you are quite sure there is no actual danger, Mr.——?”

“Salter,” he terminated for her.  “You may feel safe.  The damage is really only slight, after all.”

“It is so good of you to come and tell us,” said the poor lady, still tremulous.  “The shock was awful.  Our introduction has been an alarming one.  I—­I don’t think we have met during the voyage.”

“No,” replied Salter.  “I am in the second cabin.”

“Oh! thank you.  It’s so good of you,” she faltered amiably, for want of inspiration.  As he went out of the stateroom, Salter spoke to Bettina.

“I will send the doctor, if I can find him,” he said.  “I think, perhaps, you had better take some brandy yourself.  I shall.”

“It’s queer how little one seems to realise even that there are second-cabin passengers,” commented Mrs. Worthington feebly.  “That was a nice man, and perfectly respectable.  He even had a kind of—­of manner.”

CHAPTER IX

LADY JANE GREY

It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock so awful and a panic wild enough to cause people to expose their very souls—­for there were, of course, endless anecdotes to be related afterwards, illustrative of grotesque terror, cowardice, and utter abandonment of all shadows of convention—­that all should end in an anticlimax of trifling danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes might be made.  Even the tramp steamer had not been seriously injured, though its injuries were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the Meridiana.

“Still,” as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock at Liverpool, “we might all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this morning.  Just think what columns there would have been in the newspapers.  Imagine Miss Vanderpoel’s being drowned.”

“I was very rude to Louise, when I found her wringing her hands over you, and I was rude to Blanche,” Bettina said to Mrs. Worthington.  “In fact I believe I was rude to a number of people that night.  I am rather ashamed.”

“You called me a donkey,” said Blanche, “but it was the best thing you could have done.  You frightened me into putting on my shoes, instead of trying to comb my hair with them.  It was startling to see you march into the stateroom, the only person who had not been turned into a gibbering idiot.  I know I was gibbering, and I know Marie was.”

“We both gibbered at the red-haired man when he came in,” said Marie.  “We clutched at him and gibbered together.  Where is the red-haired man, Betty?  Perhaps we made him ill.  I’ve not seen him since that moment.”

“He is in the second cabin, I suppose,” Bettina answered, “but I have not seen him, either.”

“We ought to get up a testimonial and give it to him, because he did not gibber,” said Blanche.  “He was as rude and as sensible as you were, Betty.”