gladly gone for nothing. Her name was Jane Holt, and her husband's
Michael Donovan.

In one of Seaton's visits to the _Proserpine_ he detected the mate and
the captain talking together and looking at him with unfriendly
eyes--scowling at him would hardly be too strong a word.

However, he was in no state of mind to care much how two animals in blue
jackets received his acts of self-martyrdom. He was there to do the last
kind offices of despairing love for the angel that had crossed his dark
path and illumined it for a moment, to leave it now forever.

At last the fatal evening came; her last in Sydney.

Then Seaton's fortitude, sustained no longer by the feverish stimulus of
doing kindly acts for her, began to give way, and he desponded deeply.

At nine in the evening he crept upon General Rolleston's lawn, where he
had first seen her. He sat down in sullen despair upon the very spot.

Then he came nearer the house. There was a lamp in the dining-room; he
looked in and saw her.

She was seated at her father's knee, looking up at him fondly; her hand
was in his; the tears were in their eyes; she had no mother; he no son;
they loved one another devotedly. This, their tender gesture, and their
sad silence, spoke volumes to any one that had known sorrow. Poor Seaton
sat down on the dewy grass outside and wept because she was weeping.

Her father sent her to bed early. Seaton watched, as he had often done
before, till her light went out; and then he flung himself on the wet
grass and stared at the sky in utter misery.

The mind is often clearest in the middle of the night; and all of a
sudden he saw, as if written on the sky, that she was going to England
expressly to marry Arthur Wardlaw.

At this revelation he started up, stung with hate as well as love, and
his tortured mind rebelled furiously. He repeated his vow that this
should never be; and soon a scheme came into his head to prevent it; but
it was a project so wild and dangerous that, even as his heated brain
hatched it, his cooler judgment said, "Fly, madman, fly! or this love
will _destroy_ you!"

He listened to the voice of reason, and in another minute he was out of
the premises. He fluttered to his lodgings.

When he got there he could not go in; he turned and fluttered about the
streets, not knowing or caring whither; his mind was in a whirl; and,
what with his bodily fever and his boiling heart, passion began to
overpower reason, that had held out