“Yes, madam.” “I admire your profession, Mr. Holdsworth, and have a good excuse for doing so, for both my father and brother were sailors. But I don’t think I could ever let my boy go to sea; I could never bear to part with him. And I sometimes wonder how the wives of sailors can endure to be separated from their husbands.” “That is the hardest part of our profession,” answered Holdsworth quickly. “I never understood it before this voyage. I have had to leave my young wife; may God protect her until I come back.” “Is she very young?” “Nineteen.” “Poor girl!” exclaimed the widow, with deep sympathy in her voice. She added, cheerfully, “But this separation will only make you dearer to each other. You are sure to meet again. Time flies quickly, and all these weary days will seem no more than a dream to you when you are together.” She sighed and glanced down at the deep crape on her dress. The moonlight enabled Holdsworth to notice the glance, and the pathos of it silenced him. In the presence of such an experience as _her_ parting was--he knew whom she had lost by her reference to her fatherless boy--his own sorrow appeared light. “There is always hope, there is always the promise of happiness in store while there is life,” she continued gently. “Do not be down-hearted, Mr. Holdsworth. This parting is but a temporary interruption of your happiness. Be sure that God will protect your young wife while you are away, and do not doubt that He will lead you back to her.” She smiled softly at him, and adding, “I must go to my little one now,” bowed cordially and went away. He could have blessed her for an assurance which, having no better foundation than a woman’s sympathy, cheered him as no thoughts of his own could have done. “That is a true heart,” he said to himself, and resumed his walk, repeating her words over and over again, and drawing a comfort from them that made his step elastic and his eyes bright. CHAPTER III. DOWN CHANNEL. At six o’clock next morning the sleeping passengers were awakened by cries and trampings which, to some of them at least, were novel disturbers of their slumbers. They might have told the reason of all this noise without going on deck; for those who slept in cots found the deck making an angle with their beds, and the lee port-holes veiled with rushing green water, and all the movables crowded together at any distance from where they had been deposited the night before. And hoarse cries sounded, and the flanking of massive chains, and the strange groaning a ship makes when she heels over to a weight of canvas. Yes! the “Meteor” was under weigh, with a spanking breeze on the starboard quarter, which she would haul round abeam--her best point of sailing--when she had cleared the South Foreland. If this breeze held, the pilot said, he would be out of the ship and toasting her in rum and water at Plymouth before the sun went down next day.