mpany,
and Lester had first made his acquaintance--an acquaintance which had
resulted in a firm and lasting friendship. Brabant wanted an overseer--a
man who understood the native language--and Lester, then a youth of
twenty, and idling about Samoa, waiting a berth as second mate, had been
sent to him by an old seafaring friend. For three years they had worked
together, and then Brabant, having saved enough money, threw up his
shore berth and bought the _Maritana_ to resume his former vocation of
trader, and took Lester with him as mate, and Diaz, who had also been
employed on the plantation, as second mate. That was seven years ago,
and the schooner, during that time, had traversed the Pacific from one
end to the other over and over again. Sometimes Brabant would take his
cargo to San Francisco, sometimes to Singapore, and at rare intervals to
Auckland. During one of his ship's visits to Fiji his chief mate found
his old friend Bruce settled there as a planter, and Bruce had induced
Brabant to make Fiji his head-quarters. So he bought land and built a
house, and then, a year before the opening of this story, brought a wife
to rule over it, much to the surprise and delight of the white residents
of Levuka and the group generally, for John Brabant had always been
looked upon as a man whose soul was wrapped up in his extensive
business, and as a woman hater. This latter conclusion was arrived at
from purely deductive reasoning--he despised and loathed the current
idea that living in the South Seas palliated the most glaring
licentiousness, and permitted a man to "do as he liked." Therefore he
had been set down as a non-marrying man--"an awfully good fellow, but
with queer ideas, you know," his many friends would say, and "Bully"
Hayes, who knew him well, said that John Brabant was the only
clean-living, single man in Fiji, and that if he ever did marry his wife
would be "some bony Scotch person of about forty, with her hair screwed
up into a Turk's knot at the back of her long head, and with a cold,
steely eye like a gimlet. Nine out of ten of good fellows like Jack
Brabant do get mated with ghastly wives."

So when the _Maritana_ one day sailed into Levuka harbour, and Brabant
brought his young wife ashore, the community simply gasped in pleased
astonishment, and even the exclusive wives of the leading merchants
and planters made haste to call on Mrs. Brabant when they saw in the
marriage announcement, published in the A