g for a week, should have opened round about us.

The captain wanted to know when I had sailed, from what port I had
started, where I was bound to, and the like. I kept my face with
difficulty when I gave him my attention at last. It was not only his
own mirth-provoking, nautical countenance; the saloon passengers could
not take their eyes off me, and they bobbed and leaned forward in an
eager, hearkening way to catch every syllable of my replies. Nor was
this all, for below on the quarter-deck and along the waist stood the
scores of steerage passengers, all straining their eyes at me. The
curiosity and excitement were ridiculous. But fame is a thing very
cheaply earned in these days.

The captain inquired a little too curiously sometimes. So Miss
Bellassys was engaged to to be married to me, hey? Was she alone with
me? No relative, no maid, nobody of her own sex in attendance? To
these questions the ladies listened with an odd expression on their
faces. I particularly noticed one of them: she had sausage-shaped
curls, lips so thin that when they were closed they formed a fine line
as though produced by a single sweep of a camel's hair-brush under her
nose; the pupil of one eye was considerably larger than that of the
other, which gave her a very staring, knowing look on one side of her
face; but there was nothing in my responses to appease hers, or the
captain's, or the others' thirst for information. In fact, ever since
I had resolved to quit the _Spitfire_ for the _Carthusian_, I had made
up my mind to keep secret the business that had brought Grace and me
into this plight. The captain and the rest of them might think as they
chose; Grace was not to be much hurt by their conjectures or opinions;
there could be nothing to wholly occupy our thoughts whilst aboard the
_Carthusian_, but the obligation of leaving her as speedily as might
be, of reaching Penzance, and then getting married.

"There can be no doubt, I hope, Captain Parsons," said I, for the
second mate had given me the skipper's name, "of our promptly falling
in with something homeward bound that will land Miss Bellassys and me?
What the craft may prove can signify nothing--a smack would serve our
purpose."

"I'll signal when I have a chance," he answered, looking round the sea
and then up aloft, "but it's astonishing, ladies and gentlemen," he
continued, addressing the passengers, "how lonesome the ocean is, even
where you look for plenty of