No sooner had the ceremony, unwitnessed save by Paul Frankston and Mr. and Mrs. Neuchamp, taken place, and the happy pair been transferred to the _Nubia_, their luggage having been safely deposited in that magnificent ocean steamer days before,—no sooner had the great steamer neared the limit of the harbour, when a southerly gale, an absolute hurricane, broke upon the coast with such almost unprecedented fury that till it abated no sane commander of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s service would have dreamed of quitting safe anchorage. For three days the ‘tempest howled and wailed,’ and most uncomfortably the _Nubia_ lay at anchor, safe but most uneasy, and, as she was rather crank, rolling and pitching nearly as wildly as she could have done in the open sea. It so chanced that one of Mr. Croker’s few weak points was an extraordinarily extreme susceptibility to _mal de mer_. On all occasions upon which he had cleared the Heads, for years past, he had suffered terribly. But never since his first outward-bound experience in early life had he suffered torments, prostration, akin to this. He lay in his cabin death-like, despairing, well-nigh in collapse. Miss Neuchamp, in spite of her much travelling, was always a martyr during the first week of a voyage, if the weather chanced to be bad. Now it certainly was bad, very bad; and in consequence Miss Augusta lay, under the charge of a stewardess, in a stern cabin, well-nigh sick unto death, heedless of life and its chequered presentments, and as oblivious, not to say indifferent, to the fate of Jermyn Croker as if she had yesterday sworn to love and obey the chief officer of the _Nubia_.