thing a little less intimate with the sea. The
purser was not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that
March wanted something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room
of those on the promenade where he had seen swells going in and out,
for six hundred dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his
wife to look at it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to
take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her. She would
be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated
whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to
the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance
of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred
dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down
thinking. All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the
doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not some last hope in
medicine before he took the desperate step before him. He turned in half
his course, and ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door of
the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched
him to save herself from falling.

"Why, Mr. March!" she shrieked.

"Miss Triscoe!" he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with
her to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie
between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her
and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess
each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had
sorrowed over Mrs. March's sad state, and he had grieved to hear that
her father was going home because he was not at all well, before they
found the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a
grim impatience for his daughter.

"But how is it you're not in the passenger-list?" he inquired of them
both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at
the last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They
were in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting
berths. Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence
of Burnamy not only from her company but from her conversation which
mystified March through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife.
She was a girl who had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately
and rapturously written them of her engagement, there was