She looked at him, started wildly up, then sank back into her chair. So the stricken deer leaps, then falls. Yet even now she put on a deceitful calm, and said, “Tell me the truth. I have a right to know.” He stammered out, “There is a report of an accident at sea.” She kept silence. “Of a passenger drowned--out of that ship. This, coupled with his silence, fills our hearts with fear.” “It is worse--you are breaking it to me--you have gone too far to stop. One word: is he alive? Oh, say he is alive!” Philip rang the bell hard, and said in a troubled voice, “Rosa, think of your child.” “Not when my husband--Is he alive or dead?” “It is hard to say, with such a terrible report about, and no letters,” faltered the old man, his courage failing him. “What are you afraid of? Do you think I can't die, and go to him? Alive, or dead?” and she stood before him, raging and quivering in every limb. The nurse came in. “Fetch her child,” he cried; “God have mercy on her.” “Ah, then he is dead,” said she, with stony calmness. “I drove him to sea, and he is dead.” The nurse rushed in, and held the child to her. She would not look at it. “Dead!” “Yes, our poor Christie is gone--but his child is here--the image of him. Do not forget the mother. Have pity on his child and yours.” “Take it out of my sight!” she screamed. “Away with it, or I shall murder it, as I have murdered its father. My dear Christie, before all that live! I have killed him. I shall die for him. I shall go to him.” She raved and tore her hair. Servants rushed in. Rosa was carried to her bed, screaming and raving, and her black hair all down on both sides, a piteous sight. Swoon followed swoon, and that very night brain fever set in with all its sad accompaniments; a poor bereaved creature, tossing and moaning; pale, anxious, but resolute faces of the nurse and the kitchen-maid watching: on one table a pail of ice, and on another the long, thick raven hair of our poor Simpleton, lying on clean silver paper. Dr. Philip had cut it all off with his own hand, and he was now folding it up, and crying over it; for he thought to himself, “Perhaps in a few days more only this will be left of her on earth.” CHAPTER XV. Staines fell head-foremost into the sea with a heavy plunge. Being an excellent swimmer, he struck out the moment he touched the water, and that arrested his dive, and brought him up with a slant, shocked and panting, drenched and confused. The next moment he saw, as through a fog--his eyes being full of water--something fall from the ship. He breasted the big waves, and swam towards it: it rose on the top of a wave, and he saw it was a life-buoy. Encumbered with wet clothes, he seemed impotent in the big waves; they threw him up so high, and down so low.