e of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if it
were really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of the
Triscoes as he himself had done. He had probably got out of money and had
hurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin fare on
the first boat back. Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blame
for such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he wished to
turn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it. He kept moving
toward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces' distance
the young man whirled about and showed him the face of a stranger.

March made some witless remark on the rapid course of the ship as it cut
its way through the water of the bow; the stranger answered with a strong
Lancashire accent; and in the talk which followed, he said he was going
out to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New Bedford, and he seemed
hopeful of some advice or information from March; then he said he must go
and try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean his wife, and
he hurried down to his own, to whom he related his hair-breadth escape
from Burnamy.

"I don't call it an escape at all!" she declared. "I call it the greatest
possible misfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could have brought them
together at once, just when she has seen so clearly that she was in the
wrong, and is feeling all broken up. There wouldn't have been any
difficulty about his being in the second-cabin. We could have contrived
to have them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst you could have
lent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the first-cabin."

"I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him," said March,
"and then he could have eaten with the swells."

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally incapable
of taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before the
stewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling that if
it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would really
have been Burnamy.

LXXV.

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship
rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping of
the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean was
livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no
perceptible motion save from her machinery.

Most of the seamans