excitement--that's
all; my strength will come back to me sooner or later if I lie quietly
here."

The steward gave way, for the time being, upon this appeal, and the
surgeon was not summoned; but Mr. Saltram's strength seemed very slow to
return to him. He could not sleep; he could only lie there listening to
all the noises of the ship, the perpetual creaking and rattling, and
tramping of footsteps above his head, and tortured by his impatience to
be astir again. He would not stand upon punctilio this time, he told
himself; he would go straight to the door of Marian's cabin, and stand
there until she came out to him. Was she not his wife--his very
own--powerless to hold him at bay in this manner? His strength did not
come back to him; that wakeful prostration in which the brain was always
busy, while the aching body lay still, did not appear to be a curative
process. In the course of that third night of the voyage John Saltram was
delirious, much to the alarm of his fellow-passenger, the single sharer
of his cabin, a nervous elderly gentleman, who objected to his illness
altogether as an outrage upon himself, and was indignantly desirous to
know whether it was contagious.

So the doctor was brought to the sick man early next morning whether he
would or not, and went through the usual investigations, and promised to
administer the usual sedatives, and assured the anxious passenger that
Mr. Saltram's complaint was in nowise infectious.

"He has evidently been suffering from serious illness lately, and has
been over-exerting himself," said the doctor; "that seems very clear. We
shall contrive to bring him round in a few days, I daresay, though he
certainly has got into a very low state."

The doctor said this rather gravely, on which the passenger again became
disturbed of aspect. A death on board ship must needs be such an
unpleasant business, and he really had not bargained for anything of that
kind. What was the use of paying first-class fare on board a first-class
vessel, if one were subject to annoyance of this sort? In the steerage of
an overcrowded emigrant ship such a thing might be a matter of course--a
mere natural incident of the voyage--but on board the _Oronoco_ it was
most unlooked for.

"He's not going to die, is he?" asked the passenger, with an injured air.

"O dear, no, I should hope not. I have no apprehension of that sort,"
replied the surgeon promptly.

He would no doubt have said the same thin