"It was too bad of you to send us below like children," said Rose.
"And you think they will recover, doctor?" asked Ethel, interrupting some playful apology of Heriot's.
"Recover? Oh yes, and perhaps be with us soon at table, too; so poor Manfredi's seat may thus be filled. Like Banquo's, it has long been empty."
"Oh, Leslie, how can you jest thus?" whispered Rose.
"I don't jest, dearest," replied the doctor, deprecatingly. "I liked poor Adrian Manfredi too well to associate his idea now with a jest," he added, gravely, as he thought of that night in the forecastle bunks, of the revelations he had heard, and the peril that was yet unaverted.
"Have the poor men said anything?" asked Ethel.
"Not much, Miss Basset, beyond a few indistinct and delirious mutterings."
"No; but they all seem to be seamen, save one."
(How little could she dream who _this one was_!)
"And you are able to distinguish," she resumed.
"At once--by their hands and general appearance."
"Is a pale, and thin--but then he has been starved--and gentleman-like young man. Though half dead with privation, he made a whispered apology for the trouble he gave us."
"Poor fellow!" said Ethel, whose eyes glistened.
"Where was their vessel from?--how was she lost?--and where was she lost?" asked Rose.
"They are past telling all this now," said the doctor, smiling, and patting Rose's hand; "by to-morrow evening, perhaps, we shall learn all."
"I do long so to hear their story--how terrible it must be--quite a nautical romance; and then, the other poor men of their ship, who have been drowned!"
"Yes, Rose," said Ethel, glancing at the captain and mate, who were each making an entry in his log or journal, "this incident will fill up an entire page of your diary."
"How--why?" asked Rose, reddening very perceptibly.
"For Lucy Page's perusal," said Ethel, with a smile that had a little mischief, or waggery, in it.
Rose grew redder, for her diary or journal of the voyage, which she had begun to keep (from the day she left Laurel Lodge), for the special perusal of her friend and gossip, Lucy Page, had proved rather a bore, and had been completely relinquished, as she could not consistently omit, and yet shrank from recording, memoranda of a certain little interview with the doctor, being naturally restrained therefrom by a certain awkwardness, if the eye of Jack Page, now almost a myth to her, as he has been, perhaps, to the reader, should peruse them also.