“Let us hope not. O, no! I’m sure not such bad luck as that. I—I don’t think, Gerald,” he added more seriously, “that you and I have been—carried through last night—to be put in worse trouble much longer. Keep up a good heart, like the brave fellow you are! We have water and biscuit enough for the time we shall need them, I’m sure.” And he remembered gratefully Captain Widgins and poor Eversham’s forethought. “We’re drifting along the coast somewhere; we shall know before long.”
“O, it has been terrible!” exclaimed Gerald, piteously. “If we only knew any thing of the others on the steamer—or about papa, or what the people on shore think about us—or how any thing is to end for us!”
“We’ll know all that in good time, depend on it.”
He spoke confidently; but the uncertainty of how “any thing was to end” for them was indeed a mighty weight.
“The main thing will soon be to get word to your father as soon as we can. Newspaper accounts will make him believe—well, almost any thing. Doesn’t it seem about a hundred years to you since two or three days ago?” he went on, as conversationally as he could. “That funny adventure in the train—our stopping with Mr. Hilliard—last night’s excitement? We can’t say we haven’t had a good deal crowded in, since we bid Mr. Marcy and the Ossokosee good-bye, can we? Or that we haven’t had enough of a story to tell your father when we get safe and sound to Halifax?”
“I shall be glad to find out sometime what made the explosion,” said Gerald, easing his position, and already decidedly more tranquil.
“So shall I. They kept it from us as long as they could, didn’t they?”
“You did from me, I know,” Gerald answered. He gave Philip a grateful look. “You wanted to keep me from being frightened. O, I know. I sort of suspected that. How awfully good and—thoughtful—”
“Very, very, very,” Philip replied, dryly. “I wish my goodness and my thoughtfulness together had gone as far as keeping you and me safe in New York, instead of taking the Old Province.”