“That’s something,” said Lionel.

“True, sir.  It would have been a strange thing if I had lost my life just as he had come home.  And I should, but for a gentleman on board.  He seized hold of me by the middle, and somehow contrived to drag me up again.  A strong man he must have been!  I shall always remember him with gratitude, I’m sure; as I shall you, sir.  His name, my husband told me afterwards, was Massingbird.”

All Lionel’s inertness was gone at the sound of the name.  “Massingbird?” he repeated.

“Yes, sir.  He had come home in the ship from the same port as my husband—­Melbourne.  Quite a gentleman, my husband said he was, with grand relations in England.  He had not been out there over long—­hardly as long as my husband, I fancy—­and my husband don’t think he has made much, any more than himself has.”

Lionel had regained all his outward impassiveness.  He stood by the talkative woman, his arms folded.  “What sort of a looking man was this Mr. Massingbird?” he asked.  “I knew a gentleman once of that name, who went to Australia.”

The woman glanced up at him, measuring his height.  “I should say he was as tall as you, sir, or close upon it, but he was broader made, and had got a stoop in the shoulders.  He was dark; had dark eyes and hair, and a pale face.  Not the clear paleness of your face, sir, but one of them sallow faces that get darker and yellower with travelling; never red.”

Every word was as fresh testimony to the suspicion that it was Frederick Massingbird.  “Had he a black mark upon his cheek?” inquired Lionel.

“Likely he might have had, sir, but I couldn’t see his cheeks.  He wore a sort of fur cap with the ears tied down.  My husband saw a good bit of him on the voyage, though he was only a middle-deck passenger, and the gentleman was a cabin.  His friends have had a surprise before this,” she continued, after a pause.  “He told my husband that they all supposed him dead; had thought he had been dead these two years past and more; and he had never sent home to contradict it.”

Then it was Frederick Massingbird!  Lionel Verner quitted the woman’s side, and leaned over the rail of the steamer, apparently watching the water.  He could not, by any dint of reasoning or supposition, make out the mystery.  How Frederick Massingbird could be alive; or, being alive, why he had not come home before to claim Sibylla—­why he had not claimed her before she left Australia—­why he did not claim her now he was come.  A man without a wife might go roving where he would and as long as he would, letting his friends think him dead if it pleased him; but a man with a wife could not in his sane senses be supposed to act so.  It was a strange thing, his meeting with this woman—­a singular coincidence; one that he would hardly have believed, if related to him, as happening to another.

It was striking five when he again knocked at Dr. Cannonby’s.  He wished to see Captain Cannonby still; it would be the crowning confirmation.  But he had no doubt whatever that that gentleman’s report would be:  “I saw Frederick Massingbird die—­as I believed—­and I quitted him immediately.  I conclude that I must have been in error in supposing he was dead.”