‘Passenger aboard by the name of Miss Dupuy? We’ve got a telegram for her.’
‘This is she,’ Edward answered. ‘How can we get them?’
‘Lower a bucket,’ the ship’s officer shouted to a sailor.—‘You can put ’em in that, boy, can’t you?’
The men in the boat caught the bucket, and fastened in the letters rudely with a stone taken from the ballast at the bottom. The screw still continued to revolve as the sailors drew up the bucket hastily. A little water got over the side and wet the telegrams; but they were both still perfectly legible. Edward unfolded his in wondering silence, while Marian looked tremulously over his right shoulder. It contained just these few short words:
‘From Hawthorn, Trinidad, to Hawthorn, R.M.S. Severn, Southampton.—For God’s sake, don’t come out. Reasons by letter.’
Marian gazed at it for a moment in speechless surprise; then she turned, pale and white, to her husband beside her. ‘O Edward,’ she cried, looking up at him with a face of terror, ‘what on earth can it mean? What on earth can they wish us not to come out for?’
Edward held the telegram open before his eyes, gazing at it blankly in inexpressible astonishment. ‘My darling,’ he said, ‘my own darling, I haven’t the very remotest notion. I can’t imagine why on earth they should ever wish to keep us away from them.’
At the same moment, Nora held her own telegram out to Marian with a little laugh of surprise and amusement. Marian glanced at it and read it hastily. It ran as follows:
‘From Dupuy, Trinidad, to Miss Dupuy, R.M.S. Severn, Southampton.—Don’t come out till next steamer. On no account go on board the Severn.’