had remained too long on board trying to save something of
importance. Perhaps the chart which would clear him, or else something
of value in his cabin. The painter of the boat had come adrift of itself
it was supposed. However, strange to say, some little time before that
voyage poor Whalley had called in his office and had left with him a
sealed envelope addressed to his daughter, to be forwarded to her in
case of his death. Still it was nothing very unusual, especially in a
man of his age. Mr. Van Wyk shook his head. Captain Whalley looked good
for a hundred years.

"Perfectly true," assented the lawyer. "The old fellow looked as though
he had come into the world full-grown and with that long beard. I could
never, somehow, imagine him either younger or older--don't you know.
There was a sense of physical power about that man too. And perhaps that
was the secret of that something peculiar in his person which struck
everybody who came in contact with him. He looked indestructible by
any ordinary means that put an end to the rest of us. His deliberate,
stately courtesy of manner was full of significance. It was as though
he were certain of having plenty of time for everything. Yes, there was
something indestructible about him; and the way he talked sometimes you
might have thought he believed it himself. When he called on me last
with that letter he wanted me to take charge of, he was not depressed
at all. Perhaps a shade more deliberate in his talk and manner. Not
depressed in the least. Had he a presentiment, I wonder? Perhaps! Still
it seems a miserable end for such a striking figure."

"Oh yes! It was a miserable end," Mr. Van Wyk said, with so much fervor
that the lawyer looked up at him curiously; and afterwards, after
parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance--

"Queer person that Dutch tobacco-planter from Batu Beru. Know anything
of him?"

"Heaps of money," answered the bank manager. "I hear he's going home
by the next mail to form a company to take over his estates. Another
tobacco district thrown open. He's wise, I think. These good times won't
last for ever."

In the southern hemisphere Captain Whalley's daughter had no
presentiment of evil when she opened the envelope addressed to her in
the lawyer's handwriting. She had received it in the afternoon; all the
boarders had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs
in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in rugs