She withdrew, and in a few minutes returned with her work-basket. She placed a chair for me under the lamp, put the dress and the work-basket on my knee, and preserving her cheerful smile bade me go to work. I believe she suspected I should be at a loss, and at a loss I certainly should have been had not the articles I required been set before me. I could not have asked for scissors, needle, thread, thimble, and the like; because I should not have been able to recollect the terms nor the objects which the terms expressed. But when I saw the things my recognition of them cost me no effort of mind. I took them up in the order in which I required to use them, picking up the scissors and cutting off a button, then threading a needle, then putting on a thimble, and all this I did as readily as though my memory were as perfect as it now is. Mrs. Richards watched me in silence. Presently she said: ‘There is no reason, my dear, why you should not belong to a noble family, but I do not believe you are a lord’s daughter. You use your needle too well to be the daughter of a lord.’ ‘I do not dream that I am the daughter of a lord,’ said I. ‘You might be the daughter of a gentleman whose brother is a lord, and there may be reasons, which there is no accounting for until your memory returns, why you should have been taught to use your needle. No nobleman’s daughter would think of learning to sew. Why should she? She might learn fancy work for her entertainment, but your handling of the needle isn’t that of a fancy worker. I shouldn’t be surprised if your father is a clergyman. There are many clergymen who belong to noble families; and do you know, Miss C----, if you wore a wedding ring I should be disposed to think that you had plenty of times mended and made for little ones of your own. Why do I say this? Is it your manner of sitting? your way of holding the dress? What puts it into my head? I’m sure I can’t tell, but there it is.’ She came and went whilst I was busy with the buttons of the dress, and when I had made an end I put the dress on and it fitted me. We then between us packed away the linen and other articles in some drawers in a corner of the cabin, and when this was done she left me and returned with wine and biscuits and a glass of hot gin and water for herself, and for an hour we sat talking. CHAPTER XII ‘AGNES’ It blew very hard in the night. It was a black, wet gale, as they call it, but favourable, and throughout the thick and howling midnight hours the ship continued to thunder along her course, with the sailors chorusing at the ropes and running up the reeling heights to shorten the canvas. Yet I knew nothing of all this until I was told next morning how the weather had been. The sun was then shining, and a large, swollen, freckled sea brimming to the ship’s side.