“My dear Daireen,” she said, two days after leaving St. Helena, “you know I love you as a daughter, and I have come to feel for you as a mother might. I know something is the matter--what is it? you may confide in me; indeed you may.” “How good you are!” said the child of this adoption; “how very good! You know all that is the matter, though you have in your kindness prevented me from feeling it hitherto.” “Good gracious, Daireen, you frighten me! No one can have been speaking to you surely, while I am your guardian----” “You know what a wretched doubt there is in my mind now that I know a few days will tell me all that can be told--you know the terrible question that comes to me every day--every hour--shall I see him?--shall he be--alive?” Even the young men, with no touches of motherly pathos about them, had appreciated the girl's feelings in those days more readily than Mrs. Crawford. “My poor dear little thing,” she now said, fondling her in a way whose soothing effect the combined efforts of all the young men could never have approached. “Don't let the doubt enter your mind for an instant--it positively must not. Your father is as well as I am to-day, I can assure you. Can you disbelieve me? I know him a great deal better than you do; and I know the Cape climate better than you do. Nonsense, my dear, no one ever dies at the Cape--at least not when they go there to recover. Now make your mind easy for the next three days.” But for just this interval poor Daireen's mind was in a state of anything but repose. During the last night the steamer would be on the voyage she found it utterly impossible to go to sleep. She heard all of the bells struck from watch to watch. Her cabin became stifling to her though a cool breeze was passing through the opened port. She rose, dressed herself, and went on deck though it was about two o'clock in the morning. It was a terrible thing for a girl to do, but nothing could have prevented Daireen's taking that step. She stood just outside the door of the companion, and in the moonlight and soft air of the sea more ease of mind came to her than she had yet felt on this voyage. While she stood there in the moonlight listening to the even whisperings of the water as it parted away before the ship, and to the fitful flights of the winged fish, she seemed to hear some order as she thought, given from the forward part of the vessel. In another minute the officer on watch hastened past her. She heard him knock at the captain's cabin which was just aft of the deck-house, and make the report. “Fixed light right ahead, sir.”