Now that it was as good as settled I was to sail in the 'Lady Emma,' I looked forward to meeting Mr. Moore next day with dread and misery. I was going away alone. All the risks of the sea lay before me. I was low and poor in health. Who could be sure that the ocean would do for me all that the doctors had promised? Who was to say it would let me return alive? I might never meet my love again. When I said good-bye to the man who by this time should have been my husband, it might be for ever, and the thought made the prospect of meeting him next day almost insupportable. He found me alone in the drawing-room. The servant admitted him and closed the door. I stood up very white and crying; he took me in his arms and kissed me, led me to a chair and sat beside me, holding my hand and nursing it, and looking into my face for a little while, scarcely able to speak. How shall I describe him, whose love for me, as you shall presently read, was such as to make my love for him, when I think of him as he sat beside me that day, as I follow him in memory afterwards, too deep for human expression? He was tall, fair, eyes of a dark blue, deep but gentle, and easily impassioned. He wore a large yellow moustache, and was as perfectly the model of an English gentleman in appearance as Captain Burke was a merchant skipper. He began immediately on the subject of my voyage. 'It's hard we should be parted; but I like your little ship, Marie. I've not met your old nurse, but I judge from what your father tells me you could not be in better and safer hands. Captain Burke seems a fine fellow--a thorough, practical seaman. I wish I could accompany you.' 'Oh, Archie, I shall be so long alone!' 'Ay, but you're to get well, dearest. I've thought the scheme over thoroughly. If there's nothing for it but a voyage as the doctors insist, your father's plans, your old nurse's suggestion, could not be bettered. Who would look after you on board a big steamer? There is nobody to accompany you--no relative, nobody we know, no party of people I can hear of to entrust you to--making, I mean, such a voyage as the doctors advise. I should be distracted when you were gone in thinking of you as alone on a steamship at sea, with not a soul to take the least interest in you saving the captain; and captains, I believe, do not very much love these obligations. Civility, of course, everybody expects, but a big ship to look after is a big business to attend to.' 'It will be a terribly long voyage.' 'To Valparaiso, and then to Sydney and Algoa Bay, and home. About fourteen months. So Burke calculates it. A long time, Marie; but if it is to make you strong, it will not be too long.'