“Oh, why,” was Fenella’s first thought, “had she not gone sooner? Why had she allowed herself to take it for granted that the winds and the waves were the cause of the long delay? Might not her heart have told her that some stronger power than those was holding her husband back? Had she even once taken the trouble to verify for herself the list of the arrivals and departures on the Guernsey boats. What selfishness, what apathy, what _indifference_, alas! she had been guilty of.” These were the self-upbraidings that pursued her all the time she was making her hurried and eager preparations for departure. Jacynth had essayed, in his usual calm and kindly fashion, to reassure her against her worst fears, but he could not enter into the subtler causes of her remorse. Ronny, in morbid terror of being taken to sea again, behaved, nevertheless, like a man, when Jacynth showed him that it was his duty to take care of his mother. That very night he, Fenella, and the child, who were so used by this time to passing for Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé that they almost felt like the personages they simulated, left Liverpool for London. A privilege children share with animals is their inability to realize the meaning of sickness and sorrow, or suffering, at a distance. Though Ronny knew that he was being taken to see “Poor papa, who was ill,” the knowledge did not bring home to him in any way the fact that he was in danger of losing his father. Fenella’s prescience was keener; the words “seriously ill” pursued her like a maddening refrain throughout the whole long journey. In vain Jacynth represented to her that “seriously” did not signify the same thing as “dangerously.” For the first time since he had known her, she showed a disposition to resent his consolatory speeches. On the steamer she hid herself away in the ladies’ cabin, a proceeding which Jacynth knew to be contrary to all her instincts, and left him to smoke his cigar forlornly on the deck. She would not even give him the solace of taking charge of Ronny, but carried the little boy below into the petticoat atmosphere of the unwholesome stronghold she had selected. Jacynth therefore battled with his thoughts alone. He was better able than Ronny to realize the import of the telegram which had summoned him to Guernsey, and it must be admitted that he did his utmost to bring himself to hope that the issue would be such as his conscience and his sense of honor demanded that he should hope; for the consideration that Frank’s death would transform the “might have been” into the “might be” was one that he strove manfully to put away. It must not be as a Judas, he told himself, that he approached the bedside of his friend, sick, perhaps, unto death at this very moment.