As soon as she reappeared I made a trial of the power of my voice. Laying down the trumpet I shouted: "Who are you?"
Back came the answer, clear, high, and perfectly audible: "I am Mary Phillips."
Mary Phillips! it seemed to me that I remembered the name. I was certainly familiar with the erect attitude, and I fancied I recognized the features of the speaker. But this was all; I could not place her.
Before I could say anything she hailed again: "Don't you remember me?" she cried, "I lived in Forty-second Street."
The middle of a wild and desolate ocean and a voice from Forty-second Street! What manner of conjecture was this? I clasped my head in my hands and tried to think. Suddenly a memory came to me: a wild, surging, raging memory.
"With what person did you live in Forty-second Street?" I yelled across the water.
A fire seemed to blaze within me. Standing on tiptoe I fairly screamed: "Bertha Nugent! Where is she?"
The answer came back: "Here!" And when I heard it my legs gave way beneath me and I fell to the deck. I must have remained for some minutes half lying, half seated, on the deck. I was nearly stupefied by the statement I had heard.
I will now say a few words concerning Miss Bertha Nugent. She was a lady whom I had known well in New York, and who, for more than a year, I had loved well, although I never told her so. Whether or not she suspected my passion was a question about which I had never been able to satisfy myself. Sometimes I had one opinion; sometimes another. Before I had taken any steps to assure myself positively in regard to this point, Miss Nugent went abroad with a party of friends, and for eight months I had neither seen nor heard from her.
During that time I had not ceased to berate myself for my inexcusable procrastination. As she went away without knowing my feelings toward her, of course there could be no correspondence. Whatever she might have suspected, or whatever she might have expected, there was nothing between us.
But on my part my love for Bertha had grown day by day. Hating the city and even the country where I had seen her and loved her and where now she was not, I travelled here and there, and during the winter went to the West Indies. There I had remained until the weather had become too warm for a longer sojourn, and then I had taken passage in the _Thespia_ for New York. I knew that Bertha would return to the city in the spring or summer, and I wished to be there when she arrived. If, when I met her, I found her free, there would be no more delay. My life thenceforth would be black or white. And now here she was near me in a half-wrecked steamer on the wide Atlantic, with no companion, as I knew, but her maid, Mary Phillips.