I sat at my solitary repast, which was bountiful indeed, and reflected upon what Mrs. Richards had said. No! it would not help me to confine myself to my cabin. By mingling, by conversing, by hearing others discourse, by gazing at them, observing their dress, their manners, their faces, some gleam might come back to touch the dark folds of memory. In the steerage they were breakfasting somewhat noisily. There was a great clatter of crockery, and a sound of the voices of men and women raised as though in good spirits, and the tones of children eagerly asking to be helped. The light upon the sea was of a dazzling blue; through the porthole I could see the small blue billows curling into froth as they ran with the ship, and the ship herself was going along as smoothly as a sleigh, saving a scarcely perceptible long-drawn rising and falling, regular as the respiration of a sleeping breast. I was looking through the porthole, when the door was thumped and opened, and the ship’s doctor stepped in. ‘Well,’ said he, in his strong North accent, knitting his brow and staring into my face with his sharp eyes, ‘what are ye able to recollect this morning, ma’m?’ ‘My memory is good for everything that has happened since I first opened my eyes on board the French vessel,’ I answered. ‘Humph!’ He felt my pulse, examined my brow, dressed the injury afresh, and said that I should be able to do without a bandage in a day or two. ‘The captain tells me,’ said he, plunging his hands into his trousers pockets and leaning against the edge of the upper bedstead, ‘that he means to keep you on board, trusting that your memory will return meanwhile, when he’ll be able to put you in the way of reaching your friends. He cannot do better.’ ‘But my memory may continue dark even to the end of the voyage,’ I exclaimed. ‘True, but you’re better here meanwhile. You might be consigned to the keeping of a captain who, on his arrival in England, would set you on shore without considering what is to become of you. How _then_, Miss C----, for that is to be your name, I hear. But if Captain Ladmore carries you round the world there’ll be ten months of time before ye, and it will be strange if you aren’t able to recollect in ten months. And now tell me--have ye never a sensation as of memory? What’s the feeling in you when you try to look back?’ ‘As though it were a pitch-dark night, and I was groping with my hands over a stone wall.’ ‘Good! Try now to think if ye have any other sensations.’ ‘Yes, there is one; but how am I to express it?’ ‘Try.’ ‘When,’ I exclaimed, after a pause, ‘I endeavour to pierce the past, I seem to be sensible as of the presence of waves of darkness, thick folds of inky gloom swaying and revolving in black confusion, and dripping wet.’