been able to support it without having to come, even for a day, to the
stupidity of stealing. After two years he escaped. He asked me to write
a letter to his wife, which he'd dictate. Marmion, you or I couldn't
have dictated that letter if we'd taken a year to do it. There was no
religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full of sorrow
for what he'd done, and for the disgrace he'd brought on her. I remember
the last few sentences as if I'd seen them yesterday. 'I am dying on the
open sea, disgraced, but free,' he said. 'I am not innocent in act, but
I was not guilty of intentional wrong. I did what I did that you should
have all you wished, all you ought to have. I ask but this--and I shall
soon ask for nothing--that you will have a kind thought, now and then,
for the man who always loved you, and loves you yet. I have never blamed
you that you did not come near me in my trouble; but I wish you were here
for a moment before I go away for ever. You must forgive me now, for you
will be free. If I were a better man I would say, God bless you. In my
last conscious moments I will think of you, and speak your name. And now
good-bye--an everlasting good-bye. I was your loving husband, and am your
lover until death.' And it was signed, 'Boyd Madras.'

"However, he didn't die. Between the captain and myself, we kept life in
him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and crew,
swearing to let no one know he was a convict. And I'll say this for the
crew of the 'Dancing Kate' that, so far as I know, they kept their word.
That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne bankers, I gave
back to him before we landed. We made him up a purse of fifty pounds,--
for the crew got to like him,--and left him at Port Darwin, sailing away
again in a few days to another pearl-field farther east. What happened
to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don't know; but one day I found
him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean, looking almost as
near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey on No Man's Sea.