"And how long--about how long will the voyage be?" "About seventeen days to Antigua." "And how long"--(still in the same wretched and resignedly melancholy voice)--"shall we have to stay there?" "It depends upon the state in which I find things?" A good long pause. My elbows are growing quite painful, from the length of time during which they have been digging into the hard _marqueterie_ table, and my hair is as wild as a red Indian's. _Ten_ days! ten little galloping days, and then _seventeen_ long, slow, monstrous ones! _Seventeen_ days at sea! seventeen days and seventeen nights, too--do not let us forget that--of that deadly nausea, of that unspeakable sinking of all one's inside to the very depths of creation--of the smell of boiling oil, and the hot, sick, throbbing of engines! "I hope," say I, in a voice so small that I hardly recognize it for my own, "that I shall not be _quite_ as ill all the way as I was crossing from Calais to Dover; and the steward," continue I, in miserable meditation, "kept telling me all the while what a fine passage we were having, too!" "So we were!" Another pause. I am still thinking of the horrid theme; living over again my nearly-forgotten agonies. "Do you remember," say I, presently, "hearing about that Lady Somebody--I forget her name--but she was the wife of one Governor-General of India, and she always suffered so much from sea-sickness that she thought she should suffer less in a sailing-vessel, and so returned from India in one, and just as she came in sight of the shores of England _she died_!" As I reach this awful climax, I open my eyes very wide, and sink my voice to a tragic depth. "The moral is--" says Sir Roger, stopping beside me, laying his hand on my chair back, and regarding me with a mixture of pain and diversion in his eyes, "stick to steam!" CHAPTER XIX. A heavy foot along the passage, a hand upon the door, a hatted head looking in. "Roger," says father, in that laboriously amiable voice in which he always addresses his son-in-law, "sorry to interrupt you, but could you come here for a minute--will not keep you long." "All right!" cries Sir Roger, promptly. (How _can_ he speak in that flippantly cheerful voice, with the prospect of seventeen days' sea before him?) "Now, where did I put my hat, Nancy? did you happen to notice?" "It is here," say I, picking it up from the window-seat, and handing it to him with lugubrious solemnity. As he reaches the door, following father, he turns and nods to me with a half-humorous smile. "Cheer up," he says, "it shall not be a sailing-vessel." He is gone, and I return to my former position, and my former occupation, only that now--the check of Sir Roger's presence being removed--I indulge in two or three good hearty groans. To think how the look of all things is changed since this morning!