"Oh cease, Sybil," said Constance; "cease; it was your papa's favourite." "Then why cease, mamma?" "He is not here, and I feel I know not what--a foreboding--a superstition of the heart." So Sybil closed her piano, and it was long, long ere she opened it again. Three weeks had now elapsed since the Montreal steamer _Admiral_ (his anticipated departure by which Richard Trevelyan fully notified to Constance) had been due at Blackwall, and yet there were no tidings of her, so insurances went up, and underwriters looked grave. No Atlantic cables had been laid as yet between Britain and America, though such things were talked of as being barely possible. The next steamer announced that the _Admiral_ had duly sailed at her stated time; so, save the letter which contained the pleasant odds and ends concerning Montreal and their early lover days, poor Constance saw her husband's writing no more. Her surmises were endless, and the worthy rector lent his inventive aid to add to them. Might not the ship have met with some accident to her engines, and put back slowly under canvas to Montreal, the Azores, or elsewhere? Lost--was the word that hovered on her lips and trembled in her heart--LOST! Oh, that was not to be thought of. Yet if it were so, some must have survived to tell the terrible story; some might have been picked up, famished and weary, by a passing ship, and taken perhaps to a distant region, Heaven alone knew where. Such events happened every day on the mighty world of waters; so as week succeeded week, the familiarity with suspense, sorrow and horror seemed to become greater; till ideas began to confirm themselves, and probabilities to be steadily faced, that she would have shrunk from in utter woe but a month before! Then came those cruel and shadowy rumours, by which the public are usually tantalised, and the relatives of the missing are tortured--stories of wrecks passed, steamers abandoned--the masts gone, funnel standing, and so forth, in this, that or the other latitude; but all vague and never verified. How many stately ships have perished at sea, of which such stories have been told! In those days, it was the _President_, the great, "the lost Atlantic steamer," on the fate of which at least one novel and several dramas and songs have been written; and but lately it was the turret ship _Captain_, with her five hundred picked British seamen, that went down into the deep, a few loose spars alone remaining to tell of their sorrowful fate. Constance and her daughter were inspired by successive hope that he might have survived, and fear that he had perished--too surely perished; and these alternations were agony, for "the promises of Hope are sweeter than roses in the bud, and far more flattering to expectation; but the threatenings of Fear are a terror to the heart."