‘But,’ continued Miss Lee, ‘I shall not be satisfied with Miss C—— as a name. It will do very well for you to be known by in the ship, but it is stiff, and I shall not be able to call you by it. There are so many names of girls beginning with A. Let me see. There is my own name, Alice; then there is Agatha, and then there is Agnes——’
I met Mrs. Lee’s eyes fixed upon me. ‘Do you seem to recollect any of these names?’ she asked. ‘I hoped, by the expression on your face——’ She hesitated, and I answered:—
‘The names are familiar sounds, but I cannot say that any one of them is mine.’
‘We must invent something better than Miss C——,’ said her daughter.
‘There is plenty of time, my love,’ exclaimed Mrs. Lee. ‘The captain is going to keep you on board,’ she continued, addressing me in her soft, slow-spoken accents, ‘until your memory returns. It may return when we have arrived at a part of the ocean where it will be the same whether Captain Ladmore keeps you with him or sends you home by another ship. For instance, if your memory were to return when we were within a week’s sail of Sydney, it would be better for you to remain in this ship, where you will have friends, than to return in a strange vessel, though you might save a few weeks by doing so. In that case we shall be together, for Alice and I are going round the world in the Deal Castle. Were you ever in Australia?’
‘Oh, mother! that is an idle question,’ exclaimed Miss Lee.
‘Yes, I forgot,’ cried Mrs. Lee, with a look of pain. ‘Oh, memory, memory, how little do we value it when we possess it! How all conversation is dependent upon it! I have somewhere read that it is sweeter than hope, because hope is uncertain and in the future, but our memories are our own, many of them are dear, and they cannot be taken from us. But it is not so,’ said she, looking at me.
‘Hope is better than memory,’ said Miss Lee. ‘It is yours, and you must suffer nothing to weaken it in you or to take it from you.’
The mother and daughter then conversed together about me, and asked me many questions, and listened with breathless interest and with touching sympathy to the account I gave them of my having been locked up all night in the cabin of the French brig. And I also told them how generously and kindly the young Frenchman, Alphonse, had behaved, how tender had been his care of me, and how he had been hurried away from the attempt to preserve my life by his uncle’s threats to leave him behind in the sinking vessel.
‘I am astonished,’ said Mrs. Lee, ‘that you should be able to remember all these circumstances, whilst you cannot recollect anything that happened before.’