Sometimes Mrs. Webber joined Alice and me when we were on deck, and occasionally she visited us when we were in the Lees’ cabin. I never liked her better than at such times. She subdued her manner, there was an air of cheerful gravity upon her, and her behaviour was as one who has known sorrow. She sank all the coxcombries of her literary talk when she was with us, had not a word to say about her own poetry, and ventured no opinions on the merits of authors. I took to her very warmly after she had visited Alice once or twice in her cabin. Much sympathy was exhibited by the other passengers, but their good taste and real kindness of heart made the expression of it reserved and askant, as it were. Both the Miss Glanvilles sang very finely, and knowing that Alice loved certain songs which they sang with great sweetness, one or another would come and ask her if she should sing to her, and then sit down and soothe and charm the dear girl for an hour at a time. But neither they nor any of the other passengers ever dreamt of opening the piano until they learnt that Alice was awake or in a humour not to be teased by the noise of the music. The hot weather tried her terribly. It was indeed as her mother had feared, and I could only pray that Mrs. Lee’s dread of the ship being becalmed upon the equator under the roasting sun for a long term of days would prove unfounded. Sometimes the girl rallied and exhibited a degree of vivacity that filled her mother with hope, and then a change would happen on a sudden. She would be wrenched and shattered by a dreadful cough, her head would sink, her eyes grow leaden, her breathing pitiably laboured; she would turn from the food placed before her, and lay her head upon her mother’s breast or upon my shoulder as I sat beside her, and at such times I would think the end was close at hand. As I have before said, she did not in the least fear death. She seemed to have but one dread--that she should be buried at sea. I sat beside her one morning in her cabin fanning her. The window lay wide open, but not a breath of air entered the aperture. The ship was becalmed: she had been becalmed since midnight, and now I did not need to inquire what was the meaning of the word. I had been on deck before I visited Alice, and looked around me and beheld a wonderful breathless scene of stagnant ocean. I know not what our latitude was; I dare say we were five or six hundred miles north of the equator. The sea undulated thickly, faintly and sluggishly, as though it were of oil, and it reflected the rays of the sun as oil might, or indeed as a dull mirror would, and gave back the burning light from its surface in an atmosphere of heat that swung to the lip and cheek with the light roll of the ship in folds like escapes of air from a fiery oven.