CHAPTER II.
THE VAGUE HORROR.
A couple of weeks at sea is sufficient to bring the stranger passengers together and make them tolerably intimate. A month, and they know all about each other, and belong, more or less, all to one family. Families quarrel and make up again, so do passengers at sea. Some vow friendships, which are forgotten, when they land; some make love which lasts a little longer; others remember those bewitching days and nights at sea longer and more tenderly than they ought to do.
The Rockhampton was rushing with regular piston-drives to her doom. She had touched at Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Suez, Ceylon, and was now pushing her way through the soft waves, azure by day, phosphorescent by night, towards the centre belt of the world, those vast and trembling waters, brimful of mystery and deliciousness as well as terror, for here the monsters of the deep have their abode—the blue-nosed shark, most ferocious of all its vicious tribe, with other strange scaly mammoths, which old sailors tell about and no one believes in this cynical age of cold reason.
Philip Mortlake had recovered his nerves and mental equilibrium during this month at sea. He had quitted England with the shamed feeling upon him that he was a pariah, and his excited nerves gave him this morbid self-consciousness. Now that he had recovered
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