limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his

difficulties, and she never enlarged upon her struggle
to live. Their confidence in each other needed no ex-

planations, and their perfect understanding endured
without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would

have been shocked if she had taken it into her head to
thank him in so many words, but he found it perfectly

natural that she should tell him she needed two hundred
pounds.

He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look
for a freight in the Sofala's port of registry, and her

letter met him there. Its tenor was that it was no use
mincing matters. Her only resource was in opening a

boarding-house, for which the prospects, she judged,
were good. Good enough, at any rate, to make her tell

him frankly that with two hundred pounds she could
make a start. He had torn the envelope open, hastily,

on deck, where it was handed to him by the ship-
chandler's runner, who had brought his mail at the mo-

ment of anchoring. For the second time in his life he
was appalled, and remained stock-still at the cabin door

with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a
boarding-house! Two hundred pounds for a start! The

only resource! And he did not know where to lay his
hands on two hundred pence.

All that night Captain Whalley walked the poop of
his anchored ship, as though he had been about to close

with the land in thick weather, and uncertain of his
position after a run of many gray days without a sight

of sun, moon, or stars. The black night twinkled with
the guiding lights of seamen and the steady straight

lines of lights on shore; and all around the Fair Maid
the riding lights of ships cast trembling trails upon the

water of the roadstead. Captain Whalley saw not a
gleam anywhere till the dawn broke and he found out

that his clothing was soaked through with the heavy
dew.

His ship was awake. He stopped short, stroked his
wet beard, and descended the poop ladder backwards,

with tired feet. At the sight of him the chief officer,
lounging about sleepily on the quarterdeck, remained

open-mouthed in the middle of a great early-morning
yawn.

"Good morning to you," pronounced Captain Whal-
ley solemnly, passing into the cabin. But he checked

himself in the doorway, and without looking back, "By
the bye," he said, "there should be an empty wooden

case put away in the lazarette. It has not been broken
up--has it?"

The mate shut his mouth, and then asked as if dazed,
"What empty case, sir?"

"A big flat packing-case belonging to that painting in
my room. Let it be taken up on deck and tell the

carpenter to look it over. I may want to use it before
long."

The chief officer did not stir a limb till he had heard
the door of the captain's state-room slam within the

cuddy. Then he beckoned aft the second mate with his
forefinger to tell him that there was something "in the

wind."
When the bell rang Captain Whalley's authoritative

voice boomed out through a closed door, "Sit down and
don't wait for me." And his impressed officers took their

places, exchanging looks and whispers across the table.
What! No breakfast? And after apparently knock-

ing about all night on deck, too! Clearly, there was
something in the wind. In the skylight above their

heads, bowed earnestly over the plates, three wire cages
rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the hungry

canaries; and they could detect the sounds of their "old
man's" deliberate movements within his state-room. Cap-

tain Whalley was methodically winding up the chro-
nometers, dusting the portrait of his late wife, getting

a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making himself
ready in his punctilious unhurried manner to go ashore.

He could not have swallowed a single mouthful of food
that morning. He had made up his mind to sell the

Fair Maid.
III

Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and
wide for ships of European build, and he had no diffi-

culty in finding a purchaser, a speculator who drove a
hard bargain, but paid cash down for the Fair Maid,

with a view to a profitable resale. Thus it came about
that Captain Whalley found himself on a certain after-

noon descending the steps of one of the most important
post-offices of the East with a slip of bluish paper in his

hand. This was the receipt of a registered letter en-
closing a draft for two hundred pounds, and addressed

to Melbourne. Captain Whalley pushed the paper into
his waistcoat-pocket, took his stick from under his arm,

and walked down the street.
It was a recently opened and untidy thoroughfare with

rudimentary side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushion-
ing the whole width of the road. One end touched the

slummy street of Chinese shops near the harbor, the other
drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of miles,

through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard
gates of the new Consolidated Docks Company. The

crude frontages of the new Government buildings alter-
nated with the blank fencing of vacant plots, and the

view of the sky seemed to give an added spaciousness to
the broad vista. It was empty and shunned by natives

after business hours, as though they had expected to
see one of the tigers from the neighborhood of the New

Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping canter down
the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Cap-

tain Whalley was not dwarfed by the solitude of the
grandly planned street. He had too fine a presence for

that. He was only a lonely figure walking purposefully,
with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with a thick

stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new
Courts of Justice had a low and unadorned portico of

squat columns half concealed by a few old trees left in
the approach. On the other the pavilion wings of the

new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the street.
But Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no

home, remembered in passing that on that very site
when he first came out from England there had stood a

fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between
a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went

writhing into a tangled wilderness without any docks or
waterworks.

No ship--no home. And his poor Ivy away there had
no home either. A boarding-house is no sort of home

though it may get you a living. His feelings were
horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In

his rank of life he had that truly aristocratic tempera-
ment characterized by a scorn of vulgar gentility and