y moment. She could hear the rush and ripple of the cloven
waters under the prow, just as a girl who leaned upon the gunwale,
intent for the first sight of land, heard it in the dawn over fifty
years ago. She could seem to look back at the girl--who was, if you
please, herself--and a man who leaned on the same timber, some few feet
away, intent on the horizon or his neighbour, as might be; for he stood
aft, and her face was turned away from him. And she could seem to hear
his words too, for all the time that came between:--"Say the word,
mistress, and I'll be yours for life. I would give all I have to give,
and all I may live to get, but to call you mine for an hour." And how
his petition seemed empty sound, that she could answer with a curt
denial, so bent was her heart on another man in the land she hoped to
see so soon. Yet he was a nice fellow, too, thought old Mrs. Prichard as
she sat before Mrs. Masham's fire at the Towers; and she forgave him the
lawlessness of his impulse for its warmth, bred in the narrow limits of
a ship on the seas for three long months!--how could he help it? Such a
common story on shipboard, and ... such an uncommon ending! Ask the
captains of passenger ships what _they_ think, even now that ships steam
twenty knots an hour. One's fellow-creatures are so human, you see.

Then a terrible dream of a second voyage, from Sydney to Port Macquarie,
that almost made her wish she had accepted this man's offer to see her
safe into the arms of her lawful owner, out on leave and growing
prosperous in Van Diemen's Land. Need she have said him nay so firmly?
Could she not have trusted to his chivalry? Or was the question she
asked herself not rather, could she have trusted her own heart, if that
chivalry had stood as gold in the furnace.

Back again to the throbbing wheel, and the ceaseless flow of the little
river at the Essex mill, and childhood! Why should her waking dream hark
back to the dear old time? The natural thing would have been to dream on
into the years she spent out there with the man she loved, who at least,
to all outward seeming, gave her back love for love, while he played the
sly devil against her for his own ends. But she knew nothing of this:
and, till his death revealed the non-legal character of their union, she
could leave him on his pinnacle. So it was not because her mind shrank
from these memories of her married life that it conjured back again the
scent of the honeysuckles o