nce, amounting almost to audacity, which had
captured her imagination; now when she needed it most that assurance had
failed!

Katrine laid herself down and made a pretence of sleep, which fatigue
presently turned into reality. She was awakened by the ringing of the
first dinner bell, and lengthened out the process of dressing by a bath,
and an elaborate re-arrangement of hair. She also displayed an unusual
self-abnegation in the matter of the mirror, so that when the last gong
rang, her toilette was still incomplete, and Mrs Mannering sailed off
alone, clasping jet bracelets round bony wrists.

Even when she had the cabin to herself Katrine showed no anxiety to
hurry. The plain truth was that she dreaded entering the saloon, and
facing the meeting which lay ahead. Until that afternoon she had looked
forward with eagerness to the arrival of Captain Bedford, whose society
would disperse the feeling of loneliness which is never more acute than
in the midst of a crowd. He was the Middletons' friend, Jim's friend;
reported to be good, staid, steady-going; not too young, straight as a
die, and a splendid soldier,--in short an elder-brother-sort-of-man,
agreeably free from romance. They would meet, not as strangers, but
with such a bond of common interests, such a certainty of future
friendship, as would carry them in a bound past the initial stages of
acquaintanceship. She had counted the hours until Port Said should be
reached, and now! here she was sitting dawdling in her cabin, dreading
to leave it, and face what lay ahead...

Could that be Captain Bedford--that man with the tanned face, whose
personality among a crowd of strangers had asserted itself with such
magnetic force; whose eyes had held her own captive, against her
struggling will? Surely it was but one chance to a hundred! There had
been other men in that group, other men hanging about the hotel; tall,
bronzed, soldier-like men by the dozen, any one of whom might even now
be sitting in the place next to her own in the saloon, wondering, with a
tepid curiosity, when Miss Beverley would appear!

It was stupid of Mrs Mannering to have suggested the possibility; not
only stupid, but officious, as were also her after insinuations.
Katrine flushed, as she recalled her own momentary impulse at
confession. Protection was not needed: even if Captain Bedford were
different from what she had expected, she could deal with the situation
without help from other