He was heartily glad to see me, and continued to shake my hand until my arm ached again. Of my story he had known nothing; for the first time he was now hearing it from my lips. He listened with acute attention, with a countenance over which expression chased expression; and when I had done, seized my hand again, and shook it long and vehemently, whilst he complimented me on my success in navigating the _Lady Blanche_ to the island, and on the judgment I had shown in planning and effecting my escape from Mr. Lush and his crew. He had little to tell me, however, that was very interesting. He had been blown away from the neighbourhood of the wreck; and though, when the weather cleared, he had luffed up to the spot where he believed she was to be found, he could see nothing of her. Mr. Prance was looking at the hull through his glass when the smother came driving down upon her, and saw the cutter shove off; and he believed that Miss Temple and I were in her. He had no time to make sure, for the vapour swiftly blotted the boat out of sight. But his conviction was—and Keeling owned himself influenced by it—that if they fell in with the wreck they would not find us aboard her. Poor old Mrs. Radcliffe nearly went crazy with grief and distress; and to satisfy her mind, he cruised over the supposed situation of the hull till the night fell; then satisfied that we had either perished by the capsizal of the cutter, or been picked up by the corvette, he trimmed sail for his course and proceeded. The disaster that had befallen us, he said, had cast a heavy gloom over the ship, and it was heightened by Mrs. Radcliffe’s serious illness, due to the poignant wretchedness caused her by the loss of her niece. Hemmeridge was entreated to prescribe for her, but he sullenly refused, hoped that her illness might be epidemical, that more might suffer than she, and could breathe nothing but threats of having the law of Keeling on the ship’s arrival at Bombay. However, by the time the vessel was up with the Cape, Mrs. Radcliffe had recovered; and when Keeling last saw her, she seemed as hopeful as she was before despairful of her niece being yet accounted for. Abreast of the Cape also, the spirits of the passengers had sufficiently lightened to enable some love-making to proceed briskly amongst them. ‘Much about twenty degrees of south latitude,’ said old Keeling in his dry voice, ‘young Mr. Fairthorne, the fellow that lisped, you remember, Mr. Dugdale, succeeded in tempting that nice young lady, Constance Hudson, to accept his hand and heart. Old Mrs. Hudson was very well pleased, sir. About the latitude of the Chagos Archipelago, Mr. Emmett induced Miss Helen Trevor to betroth herself to him. And off the Laccadive Islands, Peter Hemskirk, to the astonishment of all hands, deposited his person and his fortune at the feet of Miss Mary Joliffe.’ ‘I had thought Mr. Emmett was a married man,’ I said. ‘Apparently not, sir,’ he answered.