f the wreck of the _Adventuress_ was
already fading from the Australian mind; no one dreamed of challenging
the signature of a man seven months dead. And as certainly and as
quietly as the memory, Whitaker faded away; Hugh Morten took his place,
and Sydney knew him no more, nor did any other parts wherein he had
answered to his rightful name.

The money stayed by him handsomely. Thanks to a strong constitution in a
tough body (now that its malignant demon was exorcised) he found it easy
to pick up a living by one means or another. Indeed, he played many
parts in as many fields before joining hands with a young Englishman he
had grown to like and entering upon what seemed a forlorn bid for
fortune. Thereafter he prospered amazingly.

In those days his anomalous position in the world troubled him very
little. He was a Wilful Missing and a willing. The new life intrigued
him amazingly; he lived in open air, in virgin country, wresting a
fortune by main strength from the reluctant grasp of Nature. He was one
of the first two men to find and mine gold in paying quantities in the
Owen Stanley country.... Now that Peter Stark was dead, the ties of
interest and affection binding him to America were both few and slender.
His wife was too abstract a concept, a shadow too vague in his memory,
to obtrude often upon his reveries. Indeed, as time went on, he found it
anything but easy to recall much about the physical appearance of the
woman he had married; he remembered chiefly her eyes; she moved mistily
across the stage of a single scene in his history, an awkward,
self-conscious, unhappy, childish phantasm.

Even the consideration that, fortified by the report of his death, she
might have married again, failed to disturb either his slumbers or his
digestion. If that had happened, he had no objection; the tie that bound
them was the emptiest of forms--in his understanding as meaningless and
as powerless to make them one as the printed license form they had been
forced to procure of the State of Connecticut. There had been neither
love nor true union--merely pity on one side, apathy of despair on the
other. Two souls had met in the valley of the great shadow, had paused a
moment to touch hands, had passed onward, forever out of one another's
ken; and that was all. His "death" should have put her in command of a
fair competence. If she had since sought and found happiness with
another man, was there any logical reason, or even exc