ilor 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.

As a little child she had never been frightened of bad weather; she
would beg to be taken up on deck in the bosom of his oilskin coat to
watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and
crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless
delight. "A good boy spoiled," he used to say of her in joke. He had
named her Ivy because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated
by a vague association of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round
his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a
tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little, that in the nature
of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else. But
he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain
satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.

After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he
hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for
the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made him
dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else,
but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination "a
rather poor stick"--even in the matter of health. He disliked his
son-in-law's studied civility perhaps more than his method of
handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his
apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with
the hall-door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into
her eyes, he had said, "You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the
chicks. Mind you write to me openly." She had answered him by an almost
imperceptible movement of her h