“For God's sake, come, Quincy!” cried Alice. “For our sake!” and Florence added her entreaties. Quincy turned and saw a woman with a child by her side. She had made her way from the steerage. She was being deported, for she suffered from trachoma. She had been refused permission to land and join her husband who had stood outside the “pen” and gazed at her and the child. Quincy placed the woman in the boat beside his wife and put the child in its mother's arms. “Lower away!” came a shrill cry. “Oh, Quincy, must we part thus?” Captain Haskins grasped Quincy by the arm. “Get into the boat, Mr. Sawyer.” Quincy saw that the boat, filled with women, was already over-loaded. He turned to the Captain and said: “There is more room here with you.” Nature's ways are mysterious but effective. A brisk breeze broke the fog, and the rays of the noonday sun fell upon a placid sea. The boat containing Alice and Florence was picked up by the _Macedonian_ of a rival line and the rescued made comfortable. For hours the steamer cruised about rescuing hundreds of the _Altonia_'s passengers, but some of the boats were never heard from. Alice and many others had hoped that the wrecked vessel was still afloat, but the _Altonia_ had disappeared,--was far below in hundreds of fathoms of water. CHAPTER XII FERNBOROUGH HALL Fernborough Hall,--not a hall in the town of Fernborough in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but a rambling, old-fashioned brick building in the County of Sussex in “Merrie England;” a stately home set in the middle of hundreds of acres of upland, lowland, and woodland. Wings had been added as required, and a tower from which, on a clear day, the English Channel could be seen with the naked eye, while a field-glass brought into view the myriad craft, bound east and west, north and south, on the peaceful missions of trade. There was no terrace upon which gaudy peacocks strutted back and forth, but in front of the Hall was a small artificial lake in which some transplanted fish led the lives of prisoners. Lady Fernborough begged the Baronet to end their miserable existence, but, to him, innovation was folly and destruction bordered on criminality. “When I am gone, Ella,” he would say, “you may introduce your American ideas, for everything will be yours. When the Fernborough name dies, let the fish die too.” The long search for his lost daughter had made him misanthropic. His knowledge of her sad death had been accompanied, it is true, by the pleasing intelligence that his daughter's child lived, but that grand-daughter, though of his blood and British born, had not been educated according to British ideas. To be sure, she was now a Countess, but she had been transplanted to her native soil, and had not grown there.