"Down the river. I was in it. My sister—she was drowned. We were going to Southend."
"I see. And Mr. Dainopoulos, he was with you and——"
"No. I'd never seen him then. You see, we were all standing by the paddle-box when the other ship cut into us, my sister Gladys and two boys we'd been keeping company with. It was something awful, everybody screaming and the boat going up in the air. I mean the other end was going down. At last we couldn't stand, so we sat on the paddle-box. Then all of a sudden the boat slid over to one side and we went in."
Mr. Spokesly made a sound expressive of intense sympathy and interest.
"And next thing I knew was somebody was holding me up and he said, 'Don't move! Don't move!' But I couldn't! Something must have hit me when I fell in. I didn't know where then—the water was awfully cold. And then a boat came, and they lifted me in. And then he swam off again to find the others. I don't faint as a rule, but I did then. There were so many, and the screams—oh, it was shocking!
"But the worst was when we got on land again. It was near Woolwich and they turned a chapel or something into a hospital for us. And all the relations of the people on the Queen Mab came down, and Mr. Dainopoulos, who'd taken his landlady's daughter for the excursion, was sitting there in a blanket when the landlady and her husband came in. They hadn't found her. You know bodies don't come up sometimes, especially when a ship turns over. And they caught hold of him, calling out 'Where is our girl? What have you done with our girl?' They screamed at him!"
"Was he engaged to her?" asked Mr. Spokesly.
"Just the same as I was with Georgie Litwell who was drowned. Keeping company."
"And what happened then?"
"Why, we fell in love. That's what I was going to tell you so long as you promised not to laugh. He was in a wholesale tobacco merchant's in Mark Lane then and he took lodgings near us at Haverstock Hill. Those other people behaved as though he'd held their daughter's head under. Really they did. How could he help it? He saved six besides me. It wasn't his fault the boat sank."