It is none the less safe to assert that there was not a waking hour of these early days in which the girl was oblivious of her new estate. It weighed on her mind far more than it had done at sea, though there she had missed Denis dreadfully, and sometimes with a resentment which she could not help. She had formed a habit of thinking in these moods of her last conversation with Ralph Devenish; it was the only cure. But fresh cause for displeasure awaited her in London. The voyage had been so long that certain Australian packets had given the _Memnon_ a start and a beating; when Nan learned this she counted on a letter, but there was none. She studied the shipping news in the _Times_. More vessels arrived from Melbourne, but from Denis never a word. Sometimes the disappointment made her positively ill; always it left her tossing between the Scylla and Charybdis of terrible alternatives. Either he was indifferent, or else he was dead. And when she deemed him indifferent, there were things unforgettable that made her almost wish him dead; but when the terror of his death came over her in its turn, then she prayed less for his love than for his life. So the days passed, and the sea-bronze soon faded from the piquant face, leaving it pale but petulant. Nan had not lost her spirit; she was one to chafe rather than to fret, but to do neither more openly than she could help. She kept herself up by exercise and fresh air. It was hard, bright weather, a little wintry still, yet with that promise of spring inseparable from the longer day and the lighter sky. There were even twigs with green tips to them, and the chestnut branches ended in sticky cones. But Nan thought of the spring before, when she had met with no adventures and had not become engaged; her obsession followed her to all her favourite places; and in her daily ride along the hard, clean roads, the black imp kept its perch. Mr. Merridew was not the man to note all this and hold his peace, for he had small tact where his feelings were engaged; but he was so little at home that it was easy to deceive him; and his first conversation with Nan on the subject was really started in the city, where his partner, Ralph's father, had been inveighing against the Dents with the unbridled bitterness begotten of a family feud. "To think of the son of that marriage sneaking into our line, under his own accursed name! It's so common; and I had no idea the fellow was at sea; but now I know how we lost our ship. You may shake your head, Merridew; wasn't she lost in his watch? You don't know the breed as I know it, and I suppose you're grateful to the fellow. But what good object could he have had in choosing our line of all others?" "To rise in it," replied Merridew with some warmth: "to be revenged on you that way, not the other. And I happen to know, because he told Nan."