What the subject of this sick traveller’s talk might be, Colin from his point of observation could not tell; but there was no mistaking the evidences of natural eloquence and the eagerness of the speaker. “He ought to be a preacher by his looks,” Colin said to himself, as he stood within the limits to which, as a second-class passenger, he was confined, and saw at a little distance from him, the worn figure of the sick man, upon whose face the moonlight was shining. As usual, the sister was clinging to his arm and listening to him with a rapt countenance; not so much concerned about what he said, it seemed, as absorbed in anxious investigation of his looks. It was one of the sailors this time who formed the audience which the invalid addressed--a man whom he had stopped in the midst of something he was doing, and who was listening with great evident embarrassment, anxious to escape, but more anxious still, like a good-hearted fellow as he was, not to disturb or irritate the suffering man. Colin drew a step nearer, feeling that the matter under discussion could be no private one, and the sound of the little advance he made caught the invalid’s nervous ear. He turned round upon Colin before he could go back, and suddenly fixed him with those wonderful dying eyes. “I shall see you again another time, my friend,” he said to the released seaman, who hastened off with an evident sense of having escaped. When the stranger turned round he had to move back his companion, so that in the change of position she came to be exactly in front of Colin, so near that the two could not help seeing, could not help observing each other. The girl withdrew her eyes a moment from her brother to look at the new face thus presented to her. She did not look at Colin as a young woman usually looks at a young man. She was neither indifferent, nor did she attempt to seem so. She looked at him eagerly, with a question in her eyes. The question was a strange one to be addressed, even from the eyes, by one stranger to another. It said as plain as words, “Are you a man to whom I can appeal--are you a man who will understand _him_? Shall I be able to trust you, and ask your help?” That and nothing else was in the wistful anxious look. If Colin’s face had not been one which said “Yes” to all such questions, she would have turned away, and thought of him no more; as it was, she looked a second time with a touch of interest, a gleam of hope. The brother took no more apparent notice of her than if she had been a cloak on his arm, except that from time to time he put out his thin white hand to make sure that she was still there. He fixed his eyes on Colin with a kind of solemn steadfastness, which had a wonderful effect upon the young man, and said something hasty and brief, a most summary preface, about the beautiful night. “Are you ill?” he added, in the same hasty, breathless way, as if impatient of wasting time on such preliminaries. “Are you going abroad for your health?”