He has told me since that _his_ first feeling on seeing _me_ was one of strong annoyance. Though a married woman and going out to my husband, I was but a young girl in fact--far too young and far too pretty (though I say it) to be travelling as I was, without an escort. It unfortunately happened that I was the only lady in the saloon, and that the ship was too small to have a stewardess. Three wives of artisans herded with their husbands and children in the black hole they called the steerage, and one of them was summoned aft as soon as we were in the river to keep me company. But as the others were disagreeable about it, and she was a coarse and dirty creature, I myself begged Captain Braye to send her back again. Poor Tom! By the way, I did not call him Tom then, of course; I did not even know his Christian name. He says he never undertook a job so unwillingly as he did that job of taking care of me. How absurd it seems--now! We sailed in late autumn, in the twilight of the afternoon. I remember the look of the Thames as we were towed down--the low, cold sky, the slate-coloured mist, with mere shadows of shores and ships just looming through it. Nothing could have been more dreary. And yet I enjoyed it. The feeling that I was free of that horrible schoolroom, and that still more horrible lodging-house, where I cooked meals over an etna on a painted washstand, and ate them as I sat on a straw-stuffed bed--the prospect of long rest from the squalid scramble that life had become, from all-day work that had tired me to death--oh, no one can understand what luxury that was! Besides, I had hopes of the future, based on Edward's convalescence and reform, to buoy me up. And then I loved the sea. People are born to love it, or not to love it; it is a thing innate, like genius, never to be acquired, and never to be lost, under any circumstances. When the Channel opened out, and the long swell began to lift and roll, I knew that I was in my native element, though a dweller inland from birth up to this moment. The feel of the buoyant deck and of the pure salt wind was like wings to soul and body. But I had to pay my footing first. It came upon me suddenly, in the midst of my raptures, and I staggered below, and cast myself, dressed as I was, upon my bunk. Never, never had I felt so utterly forsaken! When ill before, with my little, trivial complaints, Miss Coleman had waited on me hand and foot--everybody had coddled me; now I was overwhelmed in unspeakable agonies, and nobody cared. It is true that--though I would not have her--the steerage woman came in the middle of the night; and once I roused from a merciful snatch of sleep to find my bracket lamp alight where all had been darkness. These things indicated that some one was concerned about me--Tom, of course--but I did not realize it then. I was alone in my misery, alone in the wide world, of no consequence even to my own husband; and I wished I was dead.