But there came a change at last. Ushant was then many long leagues astern, and the night had been dark but quiet, with a long Biscayan swell brimming to our starboard quarter, and a play of sheet-lightning off the lee bow, and wind enough to send the Indiaman through it at some six knots with her royals and cross-jack furled and the weather clew of her mainsail up. This was as the picture showed when I went to bed at five bells--half-past ten--and on opening my eyes next morning I found the berth brilliant with sunshine, bulkhead and ceiling trembling to the glory rippling off the sea through the large round scuttle or porthole, and the action of the ship a stately gliding, with a slow long floating heave that raised no sound whatever of creak or straining, and that, after the long spell of tumblefication, was as grateful to every sense and to all wearied bones as the firm unrocking surface of dry land. Mr. Colledge was shaving himself. I lay eyeing him for a few minutes, admiring the handsome high-born looks of the youth, and thinking it was a pity that such manly beauty as his should lack the consecrating touch of an intellectual expression to parallel his physical graces. He saw me in the glass in which he was scraping himself. ‘Good-morning, Dugdale. I feel all right again, d’ye know. I am going to eat my breakfast in the cuddy and then go on deck.’ ‘Glad to hear it,’ said I, putting my legs over the side of the bunk. ‘I suppose there’ll be some girls about this morning,’ said he. ‘Who the dooce are the passengers, I wonder? Anybody very nice aboard, not counting that ripping young lady with the black eyes?’ ‘Nearly everybody’s been as sea-sick as you,’ said I; ‘and the few who have put in an appearance are males--your friend Emmett, the fat Dutchman, and two or three others.’ ‘Oh, you mean Mynheer Hemskirk, the corpulent chap, whose voice sounds like that of a man inside a rum puncheon talking through the bunghole.’ I asked him if he could tell me anything about Miss Temple, the black-eyed lady. ‘Some one told me at Gravesend,’ he answered--‘but I don’t know who it was--that she’s a daughter of Sir Conyers Temple. I think I’ve heard my father speak of him as a man he has hunted with. If he’s that Sir Conyers, he broke his neck four years ago in a steeplechase.’ ‘Who accompanies the young lady to India, I wonder?’ said I. ‘Her aunt, I believe; but I don’t know her name. But I say, though, what makes you so inquisitive?’ ‘Oh, my dear Colledge,’ said I, ‘one is always inquisitive about one’s fellow-passengers on board ship. The girl came up to me on deck the other night when the row of the collision was in full swing. I see her big eyes now--black as ebony, yet luminous too, with the flame of a flare-tin at the side reflected in each magnificent orb in a spot of crimson which made her pale hooded face as mystical as a vision of the night.’