Several friends offered like objections. One suggested I should ask that the clothes should be sent home, and submitted to the inspection of those from whom Marie bought her outfit; the shopmen would know their own wares. If they asserted the clothes had been sold by them--had at any time passed through their hands--there would be something solid to go upon; I could then sail for the Cape and confirm by inspection what to most would pass as a foregone conclusion. But my answer was, it was not very conceivable that those who held the clothes would part with them; it was no case of suspected murder, so as to admit of the introduction of the machinery of the law; moreover, if I waited, the remains would become unrecognisable. It was already a question how far the climate would admit of an identification of them. The body arrived at the Cape August 10; this was the close of October. December would have come before I landed; and December is the burning midsummer of South Africa. But herein, as in all the rest, I was prepared to take my chance. I felt a secret reluctance in one direction only. It shocked me even in imagination to think, if the remains _should_ prove Marie's, of the memory I must return home with and be haunted by to my death-bed. On November 5 I travelled to Southampton, and on the following day embarked in the steamship 'Cambrian' for Cape Town. I had said good-bye to my friends in London and went on board alone. Never did passenger tread a ship's deck with heavier heart than I. The vessel was full of bustle and confusion; she was taking out a large number of passengers who, with their friends, filled her fore and aft, overflowing the saloon, and crowding the raised deck or poop. It is at such a time as this, and amid such a crowd as littered the 'Cambrian's' decks, that you learn what real loneliness is. I looked around me and saw not one face I had ever met before. There was much surging and elbowing of figures in the gangway, a constant dragging here and there of baggage, shouts from the ship to the shore, from the shore to the ship, with stewards dodging and shoving in and out, officers of the steamer twinkling and flitting in the finery of the merchant service. I contrasted all this noise--threaded by strange groaning rumblings down in the bowels of the metal keel, as though the giant, steam, lying imprisoned, was beginning to mutter in his impatience and shake his chains--with the peace on board the 'Lady Emma' when I mounted her side with Marie and her father and Mrs. Burke. All was quiet there, the masts pointed their crossed and knitted heights silent in the breeze as a tree that sleeps in the dead calm of a summer's night; about was spread a shining scene of river abounding in life and colour, in gliding and in stately motion; but the ear was not vexed.