Emmeline, unwilling to acknowledge that she had been so extremely absent as not to know he was in the room, answered, without expressing her surprise to see him there—'I was thinking how fatal this storm which we are contemplating, may be to the fortunes and probably the lives of thousands.'
'The gale,' returned Godolphin, 'is heavy, but by no means of such fatal power as you apprehend. I have been at sea in several infinitely more violent, and shall probably be in many others.'
'I hope not,' answered Emmeline, without knowing what she said—'Surely you do not mean it?'
'A professional man,' said he, smiling, and flattered by the eagerness with which she spoke, 'has, you know, no will of his own. I certainly should not seek danger; but it is not possible in such service as ours to avoid it.'
'Why then do you not quit it?'
'If I intended to give you a high idea of my prudence, I should say, because I am a younger brother. But to speak honestly, that is not my only motive; my fortune, limited as it is, is enough for all my wishes, and will probably suffice for any I shall now ever form; but a man of my age ought not surely to waste in torpid idleness, or trifling dissipation, time that may be usefully employed. Besides, I love the profession to which I have been brought up, and, by engaging in which, I owe a life to my country if ever it should be called for.'
'God forbid it ever should!' said Emmeline, with quickness; 'for then,' continued she, hesitating and blushing, 'what would poor Lady Adelina do? and what would become of my dear little boy?'
Godolphin, charmed yet pained by this artless expression of sensibility, and thrown almost off his guard by the idea of not being wholly indifferent to her, answered mournfully—'To them, indeed, my life may be of some value; but to myself it is of none. Ah, Miss Mowbray! it might have been worth preserving had I——But wherefore presume I to trouble you on a subject so hopeless? I know not what has tempted me to intrude on your thoughts the incoherences of a mind ill at ease. Pardon me—and suffer not my folly to deprive me of the happiness of being your friend, which is all I will ever pretend to.'
He turned away, and hastened out of the room; leaving Emmeline in such confusion that it was not 'till Mrs. Stafford came to call her to Lady Adelina's dressing-room, that she remembered where she was, and the necessity of recollecting her scattered thoughts. When they met at dinner, she could not encounter the eyes of Godolphin without the deepest blushes: Lady Adelina, given wholly up to the idea of their approaching separation, and Mrs. Stafford, occupied by uneasiness of her own, did not attend to the singularity of her manner.
The latter had never beheld such a tempest as was now raging; and she could not look towards the sea, whose high and foaming billows were breaking so near them, without shivering at the terrifying recollection, that in a very few hours her children, all she held dear on earth, would be exposed to this capricious and furious element. Tho' of the steadiest resolution in any trial that merely regarded herself, she was a coward when these dear objects of her fondness were in question; and she could not help expressing to Mr. Godolphin some part of her apprehensions.