Shirley stood at the rail under the bridge of the ocean greyhound that was carrying her back to America with all the speed of which her mighty engines were capable.  All day and all night, half naked stokers, so grimed with oil and coal dust as to lose the slightest semblance to human beings, feverishly shovelled coal, throwing it rapidly and evenly over roaring furnaces kept at a fierce white heat.  The vast boilers, shaken by the titanic forces generating in their cavern-like depths, sent streams of scalding, hissing steam through a thousand valves, cylinders and pistons, turning wheels and cranks as it distributed the tremendous power which was driving the steel monster through the seas at the prodigious speed of four hundred miles in the twenty-four hours.  Like a pulsating heart in some living thing, the mammoth engines throbbed and panted, and the great vessel groaned and creaked as she rose and fell to the heavy swell, and again lurched forward in obedience to each fresh propulsion from her fast spinning screws.  Out on deck, volumes of dense black smoke were pouring from four gigantic smoke stacks and spread out in the sky like some endless cinder path leading back over the course the ship had taken.

They were four days out from port.  Two days more and they would sight Sandy Hook, and Shirley would know the worst.  She had caught the North German Lloyd boat at Cherbourg two days after receiving the cablegram from New York.  Mrs. Blake had insisted on coming along in spite of her niece’s protests.  Shirley argued that she had crossed alone when coming; she could go back the same way.  Besides, was not Mr. Ryder returning home on the same ship?  He would be company and protection both.  But Mrs. Blake was bent on making the voyage.  She had not seen her sister for many years and, moreover, this sudden return to America had upset her own plans.  She was a poor sailor, yet she loved the ocean and this was a good excuse for a long trip.  Shirley was too exhausted with worry to offer further resistance and by great good luck the two women had been able to secure at the last moment a cabin to themselves amidships.  Jefferson, less fortunate, was compelled, to his disgust, to share a stateroom with another passenger, a fat German brewer who was returning to Cincinnati, and who snored so loud at night that even the thumping of the engines was completely drowned by his eccentric nasal sounds.

The alarming summons home and the terrible shock she had experienced the following morning when Jefferson showed her the newspaper article with its astounding and heart rending news about her father had almost prostrated Shirley.  The blow was all the greater for being so entirely unlooked for.  That the story was true she could not doubt.  Her mother would not have cabled except under the gravest circumstances.  What alarmed Shirley still more was that she had no direct news of her father.  For a moment her heart stood still—­suppose the shock of this shameful