y poor mother--their opinion of my father they
discreetly kept to themselves. So I had kept the cheque, for burning
with resentment against him as I was at the time, I remembered the words
of my mother's last letter to me, written with her dying hand.

"Try hard to please him, James. He is very cold and stern, but I am sure
that, deep down in his heart, he loves you well."

That letter, with the cheque inside it, was now yellowed, and the
writing faint, but I had kept them both. I would write to him some day,
I had thought, and send him back the cheque, and my mother's letter as
well, and then perhaps the hard old man would forgive me, and write and
say "Come." But the years went by, and I never wrote, and now it was too
late, after fifteen had passed. Very likely he was dead, and had willed
his money to churches or hospitals, or some such charities, and I should
always be "Jim Sherry, the trader," to the end of my days, and never
"James Shervinton, Esq., of Moya Woods, Donegal."

Well, after all, what did it matter? I thought, as I held on to the
forestay, and looked at the now paling moon sinking low down on our lee,
as the glow of the coming sun tipped a bank of cloud to windward, with
a narrow wavering ribbon of shining gold. I had nothing at which to
grumble. My fifteen years of wandering had done me good, although I had
not saved money--money, that in my father's eyes brought, before eternal
salvation in the next world, primarily the beatitudes of some county
eminence in Ireland and British respectability generally in this. Unless
my father was still alive, and I could know he wanted to see me before
he died, I should never go home--not after fifteen years of South Sea
life.

Why should I not accept what Fate meant for me, and my own inclinations
told me that I was destined for? I was intended to be "Jim Sherry, the
trader,"--and I should ask "Niabon, of Danger Island," to be
"Jim Sherry's" wife. Why not. I had never cared for any woman before
except in a fleeting, and yet degrading manner--in a way which had left
no memories with me that I could look back upon with tender regrets.
She and I together might do great things in the South Seas, and found
a colony of our own. She had white blood in her veins--of that I
felt certain--and where Ben Boyd, of the old colonial days, failed to
achieve, I, with a woman like Niabon for my wife, could succeed. Ben
Boyd was a dreamer, a man of wealth and of flocks and herds,