minute."

Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a world wildly unbuttoned
and unlaced, where it was the fashion for ladies to wear their hair down
their backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to speak to
each other without introduction. The place with which she 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 fr