would own to the superstitious terrors which had hold of them, and yet all felt the eerie sensation and horrifying delusions, the actual perpetrator perhaps least of all; yet even he had a strange foreboding and almost regret upon him, and he had to admit to himself that it was an unholy act which even the Red Cause could hardly justify.
With a fair breeze these morbid feelings might not have been experienced, for distance, like time, blunts terror; but here they were stationary, almost on the spot where their victims had been cast into the sea, and they could not get away from the vicinity.
They lay on deck all through the night, trying to fix their eyes on the stars, and keep from looking round them at the shadows of the decks, sleeping only by short snatches, to start up with fear and trembling—that is, the two women felt all this horror. The doctor lay brooding and planning what he would do when once more on dry land. Like Napoleon, his star did not shine brightly at sea, and he hated it during this forced inactivity. If he saw the ghosts as the others did, he put it down to scientific reasons, and refused to believe in the psychological, yet for all that he hovered near his companions.
Dennis was brooding also, and not happily. He could navigate a ship fairly well, as far as steering her went and setting sails, but this was his first experience as responsible commander, and he felt frightened in case he might make the same deplorable mistake as poor Anatole had done. His former experience also told him that these were treacherous waters they were amongst, and that if a cyclone did come, or even a very ordinary squall, that they would all be in very great danger, with those unmanageable sails spread out.
