her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in
the cabin. On the very day they got engaged he had written to London
for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it
reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the
first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor--an event that to
the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as
the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of
solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its
sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the
ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read
the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his
voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him
with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red
granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.
He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember
much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the
crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child
out of one of her black skirts.

He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish
stream. It will break out and flow over a man's troubles, it will close
upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has
gone to the bottom. And the world is not bad. People had been very
kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner
in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor. It was she who
volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to
England (something of a journey in those days, even by the overland
mail route) with her own girls to finish her education. It was ten years
before he saw her again.