Alone on a Wide Sea, Volume III

And now it is necessary that I should skip a considerable period of time -- no less a period of time indeed than ten months -- that this story may bring me to a close relation of my own affairs; for the most extraordinary part of my strange adventures yet remains to be unfolded, and no purpose can be served by my keeping you dawdling on shipboard, when everything from this time material befell me on shore.

I will not speak of the grief of Mrs. Lee; her bereavement left her childless, and, indeed, alone in the world, and her loss was as an arrow in her heart. Alice had been left to her when her first child was taken; but now Alice was gone, and loneliness and childlessness rendered the loss of this daughter a far deeper affliction than had been the death of the other. But Mrs. Lee was a woman of strong religious feelings; resignation grew in her with the help of prayer, and with the compassion of God, and through much silent meditation; and, long before we arrived in Australia, she could bear to say and to hear many things concerning Alice which, in the earliest stages of her grief, her faltering tongue could not have pronounced, nor her stricken heart endure to listen to.