re
we so true to our ideals? But one glance at the young priests as they
sat crouching in the outer cabin, telling their beads and crossing
themselves with the vehemence of a frightened faith, was enough.
Father Shamrock was no type. Very possibly his own life would show but
coarse and poor against the chaste, heroic portraits he had drawn. He
had the dramatic faculty: for the moment he was what he related--that
was all.

Our vigilant duenna had gradually risen to a sitting posture, and
drawn nearer and nearer, and as the narrator's voice sank into silence
she said with effusion, "Well, _you_ are a good man, I guess."

But Fanny Meyrick sat as if entranced. The gale had died away, and, to
break the spell, I asked her if she wanted to take one peep on deck,
to see if there was a star in the heavens.

There was no star, but a light rising and falling with the ship's
motion, which was pronounced by a sailor to be Queenstown light, shone
in the distance.

The Father was to leave us there. "We shall not make it to-night,"
said the sailor. "It is too rough. Early in the morning the passengers
will land."

"I wish," said Fanny with a deep sigh, as if wakening from a dream,
"that the Church of Rome was at the bottom of the sea!"

CHAPTER VIII.

Arrived at our dock, I hurried off to catch the train for London. The
Meyricks lingered for a few weeks in Wales before coming to
settle down for the winter. I was glad of it, for I could make my
arrangements unhampered. So I carefully eliminated Clarges street from
my list of lodging-houses, and finally "ranged" myself with a neat
landlady in Sackville street.

How anxiously I awaited the first letter from Bessie! As the banker's
clerk handed it over the counter to me, instead of the heavy envelope
I had hoped for, it was a thin slip of an affair that fluttered away
from my hand. It was so very slim and light that I feared to open it
there, lest it should be but a mocking envelope, nothing more.

So I hastened back to my cab, and, ordering the man to drive to the
law-offices, tore it open as I jumped in. It enclosed simply a
printed slip, cut from some New York paper--a list of the Algeria's
passengers.

"What joke is this?" I said as I scanned it more closely.

By some spite of fortune my name was printed directly after the
Meyrick party. Was it for this, this paltry thing, that Bessie
has denied me a word? I turned over the envelope, turned it inside
out--not a