hstanding this interview, was far from being at ease next
day, and he felt the courage he had mustered up, to go straight to
Elizabeth with the dress and ring, altogether gone.

In the evening, when all the crew were given leave from the ship for
three weeks, he went off to his father instead, to see if he could learn
more of the situation through inquiries from him; and on the following
Monday both were present at old Jacob's interment in Tromoe churchyard.

CHAPTER IX.

All these events had come upon Elizabeth with overwhelming suddenness.
It seemed to her like a confused dream. Yet the fact remained that there
she was, dressed in black, an inmate of one of those handsome houses,
the interiors of which she had so often pictured to herself out on
Torungen.

Captain Beck was married to a second wife, a woman of stern principles,
full of decision and respectability, who had brought him a considerable
fortune, and, under her lynx-eyed rule, had restored that order in
household matters which, during the period her husband was a widower,
had been far too much neglected; and though his power might still be
absolute on board the Juno, it had long since ceased to be so in his own
house. By her grown-up step-children Madam Beck was in the highest
degree respected, though not exactly loved, owing to the various
unaccustomed restraints to which they now found themselves subjected;
and as to Carl, his easy tact, notwithstanding the independent position
which he enjoyed in his home as salaried member of a coast commission,
enabled him to keep on the best of terms with his imperious stepmother.
His duties would detain him about home for another year, to be still
feted by the town, and idolised by his sisters, who were never tired of
speculating upon eligible matches for him.

From the very first, Elizabeth, who, in her utter ignorance how to
behave, committed one egregious blunder after another, had perceived
with her strong sense that it would require all the cleverness and
patience she possessed to enable her to maintain the situation; and she
began by following Madam Beck about untiringly like a lamb. Many a
painful scene had she to go through during the earlier period of their
connection, and she bore them with a quiet gentleness which Madam Beck
took for modest docility, but which had its real origin in a fixed
determination to succeed. Every now and then, however, she would give it
up as hopeless, and would seat h