Madame thanked him very profusely; but assured him that so long as the
weather looked so stormy she could not think of intrusting Josephine and
Veronique to the mercy of the waves.

Now, if George Brand had little hope of meeting his friends that day,
he acted pretty much as if he were expecting some one. First of all, he
had secured a saloon-carriage in the afternoon mail-train to London--an
unnecessary luxury for a bachelor well accustomed to the hardships of
travel. Then he had managed to procure a handsome bouquet of freshly-cut
flowers. Finally, there was some mysterious arrangement by which fruit,
cakes, tea, and wine were to be ready at a moment's notice in the event
of that saloon-carriage being required.

Then, as soon as the rumor went through the hotel that the vessel was in
sight, away he went down the pier, with his coat-collar tightly
buttoned, and his hat jammed down. What a toy-looking thing the steamer
was, away out there in the mists or the rain, with the brown line of
smoke stretching back to the horizon! She was tossing and rolling a good
deal among the brown waves: he almost hoped his friends were not on
board. And he wished that all the more when he at length saw the people
clamber up the gangway--a miserable procession of half-drowned folk,
some of them scarcely able to walk. No; his friends were not there. He
returned to the hotel, and to his books.

But the attentions of Josephine and Veronique had become too pressing;
so he retired from the reading-room, and took refuge in his own room
up-stairs. It fronted the sea. He could hear the long, monotonous,
continuous wash of the waves: from time to time the windows rattled with
the wind.