doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife--a flawless angel
in the retrospect--while finding natural solace in the company of
living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much
in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from
trying to comfort him. A big fellow, with a square, hard face, and a
fist to fell an ox--that was just the kind of man to call for
coddling, apart from the fact that he was a widower--had been
married for as long as five weeks altogether--with his heart in his
wife's grave, and with that pathetic adjunct, a baby. When he would
consent to recognise the world of affairs again, and the claims of
youth and manhood against it, he found--but of course there is no need
to specify all the things he found.

One was a batch of invitations awaiting each arrival of his ship in
port--first two, then four, then half-a-dozen women's notes, begging
him to come to as many hospitable houses for change and rest, and to
"bring the baby". He could not bring the baby, for reasons which he did
not honestly present, as a rule, but which he reluctantly disclosed to
Alice Urquhart one night at Five Creeks. Alice had written one of the
six notes (they were six because it was Christmas time), for she was
the sister of Jim Urquhart, who was the friend of an ex-squatter down
on his luck through droughts, and reduced to balancing ledgers in a
Melbourne office, who was the friend of one of those doctors of
Williamstown whose skill had brought Guthrie Carey to life after he had
been drowned. Jim, having made the acquaintance of the latter, took his
sister to inspect the ship, and to have tea in the mate's cabin; hence
the return visit, which the captain, who loved his chief officer,
stretched a point to sanction.

There were at Five Creeks station, besides Jim, a Mrs Urquhart and