nd with a
glow like the reflection of a fire. It fell on the bright colors and the
dark faces of the bare-footed crowd, on the pallid yellow backs of the
half-naked jostling coolies, on the accouterments of a tall Sikh trooper
with a parted beard and fierce mustaches on sentry before the gate of
the police compound. Looming very big above the heads in a red haze of
dust, the tightly packed car of the cable tramway navigated cautiously
up the human stream, with the incessant blare of its horn, in the manner
of a steamer groping in a fog.

Captain Whalley emerged like a diver on the other side, and in the
desert shade between the walls of closed warehouses removed his hat to
cool his brow. A certain disrepute attached to the calling of a
landlady of a boarding-house. These women were said to be rapacious,
unscrupulous, untruthful; and though he contemned no class of his
fellow-creatures--God forbid!--these were suspicions to which it was
unseemly that a Whalley should lay herself open. He had not expostulated
with her, however. He was confident she shared his feelings; he was
sorry for her; he trusted her judgment; he considered it a merciful
dispensation that he could help her once more,--but in his aristocratic
heart of hearts he would have found it more easy to reconcile himself to
the idea of her turning seamstress. Vaguely he remembered reading years
ago a touching piece called the "Song of the Shirt." It was all very
well making songs about poor women. The granddaughter of Colonel
Whalley, the landlady of a boarding-house! Pooh! He replaced his hat,
dived into two pockets, and stopping a moment to apply a flaring match
to the end of a cheap cheroot, blew an embittered cloud of smoke at a
world that could hold such surprises.

Of one thing he was certain--that she was the own child of a clever
mother. Now he had got over the wrench of parting with his ship, he
perceived clearly that such a step had been unavoidable. Perhaps he had
been growing aware of it all along with an unconfessed knowledge. But
she, far away there, must have had an intuitive perception of it, with
the pluck to face that truth and the courage to speak out--all the
qualities which had made her mother a woman of such excellent counsel.

It would have had to come to that in the end! It was fortunate she had
forced his hand. In another year or two it would have been an utterly
barren sale. To keep the ship going he had been involving himself deeper