whom he was not quite sure that he ought not to feel
himself engaged. But the face that was clearest to him of all,--and
which became the dearer the nearer that he approached to a state of
dozing,--was that of Hester Bolton, whose voice he had hardly heard, who
had barely spoken to him;--the tips of whose fingers he had only just
touched. If there was any one thing fixed on his mind it was that, as
soon as he had put together a large lump of gold, he would go back to
Cambridge and win Hester Bolton to be his wife. But yet what a singular
woman was this Mrs. Smith! As to marrying her, that of course had been a
joke produced by the petulance of his snoring friend. He began to
dislike Shand, because he did snore so loudly, and drank so much bottled
ale, and smelt so strongly of cavendish tobacco. Mrs. Smith was at any
rate much too good for Shand. Surely she must have been a lady, or her
voice would not have been sweet and silvery? And though she did bristle
roughly against the ill-usage of the world, and say strong things, she
was never absolutely indelicate or even loud. And she was certainly very
interesting. How did it come to pass that she was so completely alone,
so poor, so unfriended and yet possessed of such gifts? There certainly
was a mystery, and it would certainly be his fate, and not the fate of
Dick Shand, to unravel it. The puzzle was much too delicate and too
intricate for Dick Shand's rough hands. Then, giving his last waking
thoughts for a moment to Hester Bolton, he went to sleep in spite of the
snoring.

On the next morning, as soon as he was out of bed, he opened a small
portmanteau in which he had put up some volumes the day before he left
Pollington and to which he had not yet had recourse since the beginning
of the voyage. From these he would select one or two for the use of his
new friend. So he dragged out the valise from beneath the berth, while
Shand abused him for the disturbance he made. On the top, lying on the
other volumes, which were as he had placed them, was a little book,
prettily bound, by no means new, which he was sure had never been placed
there by himself. He took it up, and, standing in the centre of the
cabin, between the light of the porthole and Dick's bed, he examined it.
It was a copy of Thomson's 'Seasons', and on the flyleaf was written in
a girl's hand the name of its late owner,--Maria Shand. The truth
flashed upon him at once. She must have gone down on that last night