ce Mavis's unwitnessed
and unlighted tragic act. What followed was miserable enough, but I can
only glance at it. When I got to Mrs. Nettlepoint's door she was there
with a shawl about her; the stewardess had just told her and she was
dashing out to come to me. I made her go back--I said I would go for
Jasper. I went for him but I missed him, partly no doubt because it was
really at first the Captain I was after. I found this personage and
found him highly scandalised, but he gave me no hope that we were in
error, and his displeasure, expressed with seamanlike strength, was a
definite settlement of the question. From the deck, where I merely
turned round and looked, I saw the light of another summer day, the coast
of Ireland green and near and the sea of a more charming colour than it
had shown at all. When I came below again Jasper had passed back; he had
gone to his cabin and his mother had joined him there. He remained there
till we reached Liverpool--I never saw him. His mother, after a little,
at his request, left him alone. All the world went above to look at the
land and chatter about our tragedy, but the poor lady spent the day,
dismally enough, in her room. It seemed to me, the dreadful day,
intolerably long; I was thinking so of vague, of inconceivable yet
inevitable Porterfield, and of my having to face him somehow on the
morrow. Now of course I knew why she had asked me if I should recognise
him; she had delegated to me mentally a certain pleasant office. I gave
Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Gotch a wide berth--I couldn't talk to them. I could,
or at least I did a little, to Mrs. Nettlepoint, but with too many
reserves for comfort on either side, since I quite felt how little it
would now make for ease to mention Jasper to her. I was obliged to
assume by my silence that he had had nothing to do with what had
happened; and of course I never really ascertained what he _had_ had to
do. The secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who would
have sacrificed her marriage to him on so short an acquaintance remains
shut up in his breast. His mother, I know, went to his door from time to
time, but he refused her admission. That evening, to be human at a
venture, I requested the steward to go in and ask him if he should care
to see me, and the good man returned with an answer which he candidly
transmitted. "Not in the least!"--Jasper apparently was almost as
scandalised as the Captain.

At Liverp