gh Margaret might forgive
she could never forget; and that she was now forewarned and forearmed in
perpetuity against any advance Barker might ever make.

One day the mail brought a large envelope with an English postage stamp,
addressed in a strong, masculine hand, even and regular, and utterly
without adornment, but yet of a strikingly peculiar expression, if a
handwriting may be said to have an expression.

"CUNARD S.S. _Servia, Sept. 15th_.

"My Beloved Lady--Were it not for the possibility of writing to
you, this voyage would be an impossible task to me; and even as it
is, the feeling that what I write must travel away from you for
many days before it travels towards you again makes me half suspect
it is a mockery after all. After these wonderful months of converse
it seems incredible that I should be thus taken out of your hearing
and out of the power of seeing you. That I long for a sight of
your dear face, that I hunger for your touch and for your sweet
voice, I need not tell you or further asseverate. I am constantly
looking curiously at the passengers, vainly thinking that you must
appear among them. The sea without you is not the sea, any more
than heaven would be heaven were you not there.

"I cannot describe to you, my dear lady, how detestable the life on
board is to me. I loathe the people with their inane chatter, and
the idiotic children, and the highly-correct and gentlemanly
captain, all equally. The philistine father, the sea-sick mother,
the highly-cultured daughter, and the pipe-smoking son, are equally
objects of disgust. When I go on deck the little children make a
circle round me, because I am so big, and the sailors will not let
me go on to forecastle under three shillings--which I paid
cheerfully, however, because I can be alone there and think of you,
without being contemplated as an object of wonder by about two
hundred idiots. I have managed to rig a sort of table in my cabin
at last, and here I sit, under the dubious light of the port-hole,
wishing it would blow, or that we might meet an iceberg, or
anything, to scare the people into their dens and leave me a little
open-air solitude.

"It seems so strange to be writing to you. I never wrote anything
but little notes in the old days at Baden, and now I am writing
what promises to be