“I slept very well, thank you, madam.” replied the captain. “I always do.”
“Well, I hope your room was more comfortable than mine. It seemed to me too hot for anything. Didn’t you find it so, Mrs. Digby?”
“I thought it very nice,” replied the lady at the captain’s right, who generally found it necessary to take an opposite view from the lady at the left.
“You see,” said the captain, “we have many delicate women and children on board and it is necessary to keep up the temperature. Still, perhaps the man who attends to the steam rather overdoes it. I will speak him.”
Then the captain pushed from him his untasted food and went up on the bridge, casting his eye aloft at the signal waving from the masthead, silently calling for help to all the empty horizon.
“Nothing in sight, Johnson?” said the captain.
“Not a speck, sir.”
The captain swept the circular line of sea and sky with his glasses, then laid them down with a sigh.
“We ought to raise something this afternoon, sir,” said Johnson; “we are right in their track, sir. The Fulda ought to be somewhere about.”
“We are too far north for the Fulda, I am afraid,” answered the captain.