"About midnight to-night, I believe," I replied; "that is, if all goes well."
There was a short silence, and then she placed her hand in mine and looked anxiously into my face.
"I want you to tell me, dear," she said, "all that happened the night before last. In my own heart I felt quite certain from the first that we should not get safely away. Did I not say that Pharos would never permit it? I must have been very ill, for though I remember standing in the sitting-room at the hotel, waiting for you to return from the steamship office, I cannot recall anything else. Tell me everything, I am quite strong enough to bear it."
Thus entreated, I described how she had foretold Pharos's arrival in Hamburg, and how she had warned me that he had entered the hotel.
"I can remember nothing of what you tell me," she said sadly when I had finished. Then, still holding my hand in hers, she continued in an undertone, "We were to have been so happy together."
"Not 'were to have been,'" I said, with a show of confidence I was far from feeling, "but 'are to be.' Believe me, darling, all will come right yet. We have been through so much together that surely we must be happy in the end. We love each other, and nothing can destroy that."
"Nothing," she answered, with a little catch of her breath; "but there is one thing I must say to you while I have time, something that I fear may possibly give you pain. You told me in Hamburg that up to the present no case of the plague had been notified in England. If that is so, darling, what right have we to introduce it? Surely none. Thing of the misery its coming must inevitably cause to others. For aught we know to the contrary, we may carry the infection from Hamburg with us, and thousands of innocent people will suffer in consequence. I have been thinking it over all night, and it seems to me that if we did this thing we should be little better than murderers."
I had thought of this myself, but lest I should appear to be taking credit for more than I deserve, I must confess that the true consequences of the action to which she referred had never struck me. Not having any desire to frighten her, I did not tell her that the disease had already made its appearance on board the very vessel in which we were travelling.
"You are bargaining without Pharos, however," I replied. "If he has made up his mind to go, how are we to gainsay him? Our last attempt could scarcely be considered a success."
"At any cost to ourselves we must not go," she said firmly and decidedly. "The lives of loving parents, of women and little children, the happiness of an entire nation, depend upon our action. What is our safety, great as it seems to us, compared with theirs?"