My father went to London next day with Captain Burke. I denied myself to callers, and until my father came back remained alone with my old nurse, once or twice taking a ramble along the seashore when the sun shone; but my health was bad, and I had as little taste for walking as for company.

I suffered from a sort of spiritlessness and a dull indifference to things. My health was the cause of my low-heartedness: but there were many reasons now why I should feel wretched. It was not the merely leaving my father and my home for a twelvemonth and longer, to wander about the ocean in a ship in search of colour for my cheeks and light for my eyes and strength for my voice; but for my health I should have been married in the previous October; and now my marriage must be put off till the sea had made me strong, and I was to be sundered from the man I loved for months and months.

My betrothal had happened whilst my old nurse Burke was away; it was therefore news to her, and she listened to all about it with eager, affectionate attention. I told her that my sweetheart was Mr. Archibald Moore, the son of a private banker in the City of London. I had met him at a ball in the neighbourhood, and within a month of that we were engaged. He was the sweetest, dearest, handsomest—I found I did not want words when it came to my praising him and speaking of my love.

She said: 'Does he often come to see you, Miss Marie?'

'Often. Every week. He is occupied with his father in the bank, and can only spare from Saturday to Monday.'

'Will he be here next Saturday?'

'I hope so.'

'Dear heart! Oh, Miss Marie, I have a thought: will not his father spare him to sail with us, so that you can be together?'

I shook my head.

'But why not?'

'Father would not hear of it.'

She reflected and exclaimed, 'And Sir Mortimer would be quite right. To be sure it would not do. Is it not a pity that we have to live for our neighbours? Neighbours have broken folks' hearts, as well as their fortunes. Why shouldn't you two be together on board my husband's ship? But the neighbour says No, and people have to live for him. Drat the prying, squinting starer into one's windows! he forces us to dress out a better table than our purses can afford, and to give balls when we ought to be cutting down the weekly bills. But he don't like the sea, my dear. There are no neighbours at sea. Unfortunately the wretch stops ashore; people have to come back, and so he has 'em again!'

Mrs. Burke made much of Mr. Moore's portrait. She had never seen a handsomer gentleman. What was his age? I answered 'Thirty.' 'All the sense,' said she, 'that a man's likely to have he'll have got between thirty and forty. It'll comfort you, Miss Marie, to remember that Mr. Moore's thirty when you're away. He's old enough to know what he's about: he's made up his mind; there'll be no swerving.'

This was a sort of gabble to please me. She knew my nature, and when and how to say just the sort of thing to set my spirits dancing. In truth the part of my proposed banishment hardest to bear was the fear that a long absence would cool the heart of the man I loved.

On Friday Mrs. Burke left us to rejoin her husband, whose home was in Stepney, and on that day my father returned. He was in good spirits. He had seen the 'Lady Emma' and thought her a fine ship. She was classed high, and was yacht-like as a model. Mr. Moore had accompanied him and Captain Burke to the docks, and was wonderfully pleased with the vessel and her accommodation.

'We've got over the difficulty of a doctor,' said my father.

'How?' I answered.

'Burke has consented to engage one. I told him if he would carry a surgeon, by which I mean feed and accommodate him in the ship, I would bear the other charges. He has a month before him, and may find a man who wants a change of air and who'll give his services for a cabin and food. Or, which is more likely, he'll meet with some intelligent young gentleman who wants to try his 'prentice hand on sailors before starting in practice ashore. Doctors find sailors useful as subjects; they can experiment on them without professional anxiety as to the result.'

Now that it was as good as settled I was to sail in the 'Lady Emma,' I looked forward to meeting Mr. Moore next day with dread and misery. I was going away alone. All the risks of the sea lay before me. I was low and poor in health. Who could be sure that the ocean would do for me all that the doctors had promised? Who was to say it would let me return alive? I might never meet my love again. When I said good-bye to the man who by this time should have been my husband, it might be for ever, and the thought made the prospect of meeting him next day almost insupportable.

He found me alone in the drawing-room. The servant admitted him and closed the door. I stood up very white and crying; he took me in his arms and kissed me, led me to a chair and sat beside me, holding my hand and nursing it, and looking into my face for a little while, scarcely able to speak. How shall I describe him, whose love for me, as you shall presently read, was such as to make my love for him, when I think of him as he sat beside me that day, as I follow him in memory afterwards, too deep for human expression? He was tall, fair, eyes of a dark blue, deep but gentle, and easily impassioned. He wore a large yellow moustache, and was as perfectly the model of an English gentleman in appearance as Captain Burke was a merchant skipper.

He began immediately on the subject of my voyage.

'It's hard we should be parted; but I like your little ship, Marie. I've not met your old nurse, but I judge from what your father tells me you could not be in better and safer hands. Captain Burke seems a fine fellow—a thorough, practical seaman. I wish I could accompany you.'

'Oh, Archie, I shall be so long alone!'

'Ay, but you're to get well, dearest. I've thought the scheme over thoroughly. If there's nothing for it but a voyage as the doctors insist, your father's plans, your old nurse's suggestion, could not be bettered. Who would look after you on board a big steamer? There is nobody to accompany you—no relative, nobody we know, no party of people I can hear of to entrust you to—making, I mean, such a voyage as the doctors advise. I should be distracted when you were gone in thinking of you as alone on a steamship at sea, with not a soul to take the least interest in you saving the captain; and captains, I believe, do not very much love these obligations. Civility, of course, everybody expects, but a big ship to look after is a big business to attend to.'

'It will be a terribly long voyage.'

'To Valparaiso, and then to Sydney and Algoa Bay, and home. About fourteen months. So Burke calculates it. A long time, Marie; but if it is to make you strong, it will not be too long.'

In this wise we talked; then, there being two hours of daylight left, I put on my hat and jacket and, taking my lover's arm, went with him slowly down the great gap in the cliffs to the seashore. It was sheltered down here. The yellow sunshine lay upon the brown sand, and flashed in the lifting lengths of seaweed writhing amidst the surf, and had a sense of April warmth, though it was a keen wind that then blew—a northerly wind, strong, with a hurry of white clouds like endless flocks of sheep, scampering southwards. The sands made a noble promenade, surf-furrowed and hard as wood; the breakers tumbled close beside us with a loud roar of thunder, and exquisite was the picture of the trending cliffs, snowclad, gleaming with a delicate moonlike light in the pale airy blue distance. All sights and sounds of sky and sea appealed to me now with a meaning I had never before found in them. I would stop my lover as we walked, to observe the swift and beautiful miracle of the moulding of a breaker as it arched out of the troubled brine, soaring, into a snowstorm, arching headlong to the sands with the foam flying from its rushing peak like white feathers streaming from a dazzling line of helmets; and once or twice as we talked, I would pause to mark the flight of the gulls stemming the wind aslant in curves of beauty, or sailing seawards on level, tremorless wings, and flinging a salt ocean song with their short raw cries through the harsh bass and storming accompaniment of the surf.

'If the breeze does not make me strong here, why should the sea make me strong elsewhere?' I said.

'It is the change. I have heard of desperate cases made well by travel.'

'It is hard! To think that my health should force me to that!' I exclaimed, pointing to a little vessel that had rounded out of a point two miles distant, and was lifting the white seas to the level of her bows as she sank and soared before the fresh wind, every sail glowing like a star, her rigging gleaming like golden wire, her decks sparkling when she inclined them towards us, as though the glass and brass about her were rubies and diamonds. 'I wonder if she will ever return, Archie?'

'Why not? Cheer up, dearest.'

We watched her till she had shrunk into a little square of dim orange, with the freckled green running in hardening ridges southwards, where the shadow of the early February evening was deepening like smoke, making the ocean distance past the sail look as wide again to the imagination as the truth was. I shuddered and involuntarily pressed my lover's arm.

'The wind is too cold for you,' he said, and we slowly returned home up through the great split in the cliff amongst whose hollows and shoulders the roar of the surf was echoed back in quick, sudden, intermittent notes like the sound of guns at sea.

From this date until I sailed my time was wholly occupied in preparing for the voyage. I went to London with my father to shop; Mrs. Burke accompanied us, and half our purchases were owing to her advice. Fortunately for her, as the wife of a sailor who was able to take her to sea with him, she was childless, and could afford to give me much of her time. They reckoned I was to be away fourteen months, but Captain Burke advised us, having regard to the character of the voyage, especially to the passage from Valparaiso to Sydney, to stock for a round trip of eighteen months: this he thought would provide for a good margin. Clothes for all the climates, from the roasting calms of the line down to the frost-black gales of the Horn, were purchased; many delicacies were laid in—a hundred elegant trifles of wine and condiments, of sweetmeats and potted stuffs, to supplement the captain's plain table or to find me a relish for some hungry howling hour when the galley fire should be washed out. Mr. Moore wrote that he frequently visited the ship, and that he and Mrs. Burke between them were making my cabin as comfortable as my old nurse's foresight and experience could manage.

So went by this wretched time of waiting and of preparation.

About a fortnight before the ship sailed my father received a letter from Captain Burke, telling him that he had engaged a surgeon. His name was Owen. His age he said was about forty-three; he was a widower. The loss of his wife and two daughters three years before this period had broken him down; he was unable to practise; had travelled in the hopes of distracting his mind, but his means were slender and he was unable to be long away or go far; yet when he endeavoured to resume work he found himself unequal to his professional calls. He thereupon sold his practice and had lived for some months in retirement upon a trifling income. Having seen Captain Burke's advertisement he offered his services in exchange for a free voyage. The captain described him as a gentlemanly man, his credentials excellent, and his experience considerable.