Sir Mortimer went to his home by the seaside next day. I promised to visit him on the following Saturday, but fretting had done its work--I was too ill to travel. I was ceaselessly haunted by the vision of the hull, white with snow, brilliant with ice, clouded with the foam of beating seas, wearily rolling with my dear one, with my Marie, _alone_ in her. Somehow I could not think of her as associated with the Burkes. She was the one, the solitary, figure in the gloomy interior of that tempest-tossed fabric, as I witnessed the vision awake and in my dreams. I was aware that Mrs. Burke had been a most devoted servant, a faithful and honest nurse and friend to Marie, but I had got it into my head that her husband had lost his reason, which would drain his wife's sympathies from my sweetheart; and then, again, realising the misery of a time spent in such a hulk, under such circumstances, I could not suppose that poor Mrs. Burke would in her distraction take heed of more outside her husband than the doom that every hour brought closer. So the vision of that wreck was always present to the eye of imagination, waking or sleeping, with one figure only in the maimed and beaten fabric. On the morning of October 20, I went to the bank, having resumed work there two days before. My father had not arrived. I went into my private room and sat down with a heart of loathing at sight of a pile of letters which it would be my business to read and deal with. I had hardly broken the first envelope when a clerk entered and said that a Mr. Norman, an old customer of the bank, wished to see me. I supposed he had called on business, and after reading the letter I held, I opened the glass door and bade Mr. Norman step in. He was a merchant doing business with Natal and Cape Colony. He at once said, without offering to sit: 'I have not called on business, Mr. Moore. I heard of your trouble, and grieve to find it but too visible in your face. This morning I received a batch of South African newspapers, and met with an account, which--I don't know, I'm sure--it may be ill-advised on my part----' He broke off, and his hand went nervously to his side pocket. I looked at him inquiringly, wondering what his Colonial newspaper account was about. 'I think,' said he, his hand still nervously twitching at his breast-pocket, 'that where sorrow is speculative the sooner expectation is ended, one way or the other, the better. This may signify nothing'--and now he produced a newspaper--'and yet it may tell everything.' He was proceeding; I extended my arm abruptly, feeling a sickness at heart, for now imagination leaped to the very height of fear--I believed I was to read something which would _prove_ that Marie and her companions had perished. But Mr. Norman must needs open the paper himself; and, in order to find the passage, he required to put on his glasses. The piece of intelligence in the journal ran thus:--