he place where the Vulcan had
lain a few hours before. He was rather looking forward,--looking off to
some spot that lay north or northeast of them: some spot invisible, yet
how clearly seen! Looking thither,--as if in all the horizon that alone
had any interest. So absorbed--so far from the ship,--his lips set in
such grave, sad lines; his eyes so intent, as if they could by no means
look at anything else. Nay, for the time, there was nothing else to
see! Dr. Harrison might come or go--the sailors might do their
utmost,--far over the rolling water, conscious of that only because it
was a barrier of separation, the watcher's eyes rested on Mignonette.
If once or twice the eyelids fell, it was not that the vision failed.

Dr. Harrison stopped short, unseen, and not wishing at that moment to
meet the consequences of being seen. Yet he stood still and looked. The
first feeling being one of intense displeasure and disgust that the
Vulcan carried so unwelcome a fellow-passenger; the second, of
unbounded astonishment and wonder what he did there. _He_ putting the
ocean between him and Pattaquasset? _he_ setting out for the Old World,
with all his hopes just blossoming in the New? What could be the
explanation? Was it possible, Dr. Harrison asked himself for one
moment, that he could have been mistaken? that he could have
misunderstood the issue of the conversation that morning in Faith's
sick room? A moment resolved him. He recalled the steady, dauntless
look of Faith's eyes after his words,--a look which he had two or three
times been privileged to receive from her and never cared to meet;--he
remembered how daintily her colour rose as her eyes fell, and the slow
deliberate uncovering of her diamond finger from which the eyes were
not raised again to look at him; he remembered it with the embittered
pang of the moment. No! he had not been mistaken; he had read her
right. Could it be--it crossed the doctor's mind like a flash of the
intensest lightning--that _his letter_ had done its work? its work of
separation? But the cool reminder of reason came like the darkness
after the lightning. Mr. Linden would not have been at Mrs. Derrick's,
as the doctor had heard of his being there, if any entering wedge of
division had made itself felt between his place there and him. No,
though now he was here in the Vulcan. And Dr. Harrison noticed anew,
keenly, that the expression of the gazer's face, though sorrowful and
grave, was in nowis