Having thus been made known to each other we shake hands, but neither of us can arrive at anything pretty to say. Then I follow Jane into her little house, the little house for which she has so happily exchanged her tenth part of the large and noisy paternal mansion. It is an old house, and everything about it has the moderate shabbiness of old age and long and careful wear. Little thick-walled rooms, dark and cool, with flowers and flower scents lying in wait for you everywhere--a silent, fragrant, childless house. To me, who have had oily locomotives snorting and racing through my head all day, its dumb sweetness seems like heaven. “And now that we have secured you, we do not mean to let you go in a hurry,” says Jane hospitably that night at bedtime, lighting the candles on my dressing-table. “You are determined to make my mouth water, I see,” say I, interrupting a yawn to laugh. “Lone lorn me, who have neither old man nor dear little house, nor any prospect of ultimately attaining either.” “But if you honestly are not bored you will stay with us a good bit?” she says, laying her hand with kind entreaty on my sleeve. “St. George’s Channel is not lightly to be faced again.” “Perhaps I shall stay until you are obliged to go away yourselves to get rid of me,” return I, smiling. “Such things have happened. Yes, without joking, I will stay a month. Then, by the end of a month, if you have not found me out thoroughly, I think I may pass among men for a more amiable woman than I have ever yet had the reputation of.” A quarter of an hour later I am laying down my head among soft and snow-white pillows, and saying to myself that this delicious sensation of utter drowsy repose, of soft darkness and odorous quiet, is cheaply purchased even by the ridiculous anguish which my own sufferings, and--hardly less than my own sufferings--the demoniac sights and sounds afforded by my fellow-passengers, caused me on board the accursed _Leinster_-- “Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.” CHAPTER II. “Well, I cannot say that you look much rested,” says Jane next morning, coming in to greet me, smiling and fresh--(yes, sceptic of eighteen, even a woman of thirty-seven may look fresh in a print gown on an August morning, when she has a well of lasting quiet happiness inside her)--coming in with a bunch of creamy _gloire de Dijons_ in her hand for the breakfast table. “You look infinitely more fagged than you did when I left you last night!” “Do I?” say I, rather faintly. “I am afraid you did not sleep much?” suggests Jane, a little crestfallen at the insult to her feather beds implied by my wakefulness. “Some people never can sleep the first night in a strange bed, and I stupidly forgot to ask whether you liked the feather bed or mattress at the top.” “Yes, I did sleep,” I answer gloomily. “I wish to heaven I had not!”