e 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?"

She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered lightly, "I don't think
you ladies ought to have been disturbed at all. In running over a common
tow-boat on a perfectly clear night like this there should have been no
noise and no perceptible jar. They manage better on the Mississippi, and
both boats often go down without waking the lightest sleeper on board."

The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of humor, listened with
undisguised displeasure to this speech. It dispersed them, in fact; some
turned away to bivouac for the rest of the night upon the arm-chairs and
sofas, while others returned to their rooms. With the latter went Isabel.
"Lock me in, Basil," she said, with a bold meekness, "and if anything
more happens don't wake me till the last moment." It was hard to part
from him, but she felt that his vigil would somehow be useful to the
boat, and she confidingly fell into a sleep that lasted till daylight.

Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly devolved so great a
responsibility, went forward to the promenade in front of the saloon, in
ho