"No," replied Salter. "I am in the second cabin."

"Oh! thank you. It's so good of you," she faltered amiably, for want of
inspiration. As he went out of the stateroom, Salter spoke to Bettina.

"I will send the doctor, if I can find him," he said. "I think, perhaps,
you had better take some brandy yourself. I shall."

"It's queer how little one seems to realise even that there are
second-cabin passengers," commented Mrs. Worthington feebly. "That was a
nice man, and perfectly respectable. He even had a kind of--of manner."




CHAPTER IX

LADY JANE GREY

It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock so awful and a
panic wild enough to cause people to expose their very souls--for
there were, of course, endless anecdotes to be related afterwards,
illustrative of grotesque terror, cowardice, and utter abandonment
of all shadows of convention--that all should end in an anticlimax of
trifling danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes might be made. Even
the tramp steamer had not been seriously injured, though its injuries
were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the Meridiana.

"Still," as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock at
Liverpool, "we might all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean