times to-day I have recalled so distinctly the picture of Rosy as I saw
her last, when we all stood crowded upon the wharf at New York to see
her off. She and Nigel were leaning upon the rail of the upper deck.
She looked such a delicate, airy little creature, quite like a pretty
schoolgirl with tears in her eyes. She was laughing and crying at the
same time, and kissing both her hands to us again and again. I was
crying passionately myself, though I tried to conceal the fact, and I
remember that each time I looked from Rosy to Nigel's heavy face the
poignancy of my anguish made me break forth again. I wonder if it was
because I was a child, that he looked such a contemptuous brute, even
when he pretended to smile. It is twelve years since then. I wonder--how
I wonder, what I shall find."

She stopped writing and sat a few moments, her chin upon her hand,
thinking. Suddenly she sprang to her feet in alarm. The stillness of the
night was broken by wild shouts, a running of feet outside, a tumult of
mingled sounds and motion, a dash and rush of surging water, a strange
thumping and straining of engines, and a moment later she was hurled
from one side of her stateroom to the other by a crashing shock which
seemed to heave the ship out of the sea, shuddering as if the end of all
things had come.

It was so sudden and horrible a thing that, though she had only been
flung upon a pile of rugs and cushions and was unhurt, she felt as if
she had been struck on the head and plunged into wild delirium. Above
the sound of the dashing and rocking waves, the straining and roaring of
hacking engines and the pandemonium of voices rose from one end of the
ship to the other, one wild, despairing, long-drawn shriek of women and
children. Bettina turned sick at the mad terror in it--the insensate,
awful horror.