He was completely dressed. On hearing the door open he started to his feet and cried in a terrible voice "What do you want with me?" I was overwhelmed with shame at my evil thoughts. "O Eustace," I answered foolishly, and without thinking of the bearing of my words, "the ship! I only wanted to call you to look at the ship." He paid no attention to my presence. "The ship! The ship!" he cries--"is she gone?" and rushes to the window. The ship, sure enough, was gone. Where she had been her three great masts still projected from the water. Slowly they disappeared, and another sharp black point, which must have been her bowsprit as she heeled over, rose and sank in its turn. How long we stood, Eustace and I, silently watching, I cannot tell. "There were lights alongside," I exclaimed, "the uncles' boats must have been there. There has been time to save the crew. O Eustace, let us run down and help!" But Eustace held me very tight. "Do not be a fool, Penelope. You will catch your death of cold and endanger the child. The people of the ship are saved or drowned by this time." _June_ 12, 1773. But a few months ago I wrote in this diary that no child of mine should ever be born into slavery and dishonour. Alas, poor foolish Penelope! What ill-omened words were those! And yet I cannot believe that God would have visited their presumptuousness upon me with such horrid irony. May God, who knows all things, must know that those words were even more justified than I dreamed of at the time: the slavery and dishonour surpassing my most evil apprehensions. Indeed, may it not be that in taking away our child while yet unborn He did so in His mercy to it and to its wretched parents? Surely. And if my husband surprised me, some months back, by his indifference in the face of what we were about to gain, 'tis he, perhaps, who is surprised in his turn at the strange resignation with which I take my loss. For indeed, I am resigned, am acquiescent, and, below the regrets which come shuddering across me, I feel a marvellous peacefulness in the depths of my being. No! no child should ever be born in such a house, into such a life as this.... * * * * * I am still shattered in body (I understand that for days recovery was given up as hopeless), and my mind seems misty, and like what a ghost's might be, after so many hours of unconsciousness, and of what, had it endured, would have been called death. But little by little shreds of recollection are coming back to me, and I will write them down. Some strangely sweet ones. The sense, even as life was slipping away, that all Eustace's love and tenderness had returned; that it was he (for no physician could be got, or was allowed, in this dreadful place) he himself who wrestled for me with death, and brought me back to life.