CHAPTER LX.
NEW SHORES.
The moonlight lay on the moving Atlantic, and filled the hollow world with a radiance soft and gray and vague; but it struck sharp and white on the polished rails and spars of this great steamer, and shone on the long and shapely decks, and on the broad track of foam that went away back and back and back until it was lost in the horizon. It was late; and nearly all the passengers had gone below. In the silence there was only heard the monotonous sound of the engines, and the con
tinuous rush and seething of the waters as the huge vessel clove its way onward.
Out there by the rail, in the white light, Natalie Lind lay back in her chair, all wrapped up in furs, and her lover was by her side, on a rug on the deck, his hand placed over her hand.
"To-morrow, then, Natalie," he was saying, "you will get your first glimpse of America."
"So you see I have procured your banishment after all," she said, with a smile.
"Not you," was the answer. "I had thought of it often. For a new life, a new world; and it is a new life you and I are beginning together."
Here the bell in the steering-room struck the half-hour; it was repeated by the lookout forward. The sound was strange, in the silence.
"Do you know," he said, after a while, "after we have done a fair share of work, we might think ourselves entitled to rest; and what better could we do than go back to England for a time, and go down to the old place in Buckinghamshire? Then Mrs. Alleyne would be satisfied at last. How proud the old dame was when she recognized you from your portrait! She thought all her dreams had come true, and that there was nothing left but to the Checkers and carry off that old cabinet as a wedding present."