o quickly but that he could
see she was crying softly to herself, as she bent her face over the
table.

*****

Three days after, Mrs. Torringley showed her nephew a note that she had
found on her niece's dressing-table:--

"Do not blame me. I cannot help it. I love him, and am going
away with him to another country. Perhaps it is my mother's
blood. Wipe me out of your memory for ever."

THE TRADER S WIFE

Years ago, in the days when the "highly irregular proceedings," as naval
officers termed them in their official reports, of the brig _Carl_ and
other British ships engaged in the trade which some large-minded people
have vouched for as being "absolutely above reproach," attracted
some attention from the British Government towards the doings of the
gentlemanly scoundrels engaged therein, the people of Sydney used to
talk proudly of the fleet of gunboats which, constructed by the New
South Wales Government for the Admiralty, were built to "patrol the
various recruiting grounds of the Fijian and Queensland planters and
place the labour-traffic under the most rigid supervision." The remark
quoted above was then, as it is now, quite a hackneyed one, much used
by the gallant officers who commanded the one-gun-one-rocket-tube craft
aforementioned. Likewise, the "highly irregular proceedings" were
a naval synonym for some of the bloodiest slaving outrages ever
perpetrated, but which, however, never came to light beyond being
alluded to as "unreliable and un-authenticated statements by discharged
and drunken seamen who had no proper documentary evidence to support
their assertions."

The Australian slave-suppressing vessels were not a success. In the
first place, they could not sail much faster than a mud-dredge. Poor Bob
Randolph, the trader, of the Gilbert and Kingsmill Groups, employed as
pilot and interpreter on board, once remarked to the officer commanding
one of these wonderful tubs which for four days had been thrashing her
way against the south-east trades in a heroic endeavour to get inside
Tarawa Lagoon, distant ten miles (and could not do it), that "these
here schooners ought to be rigged as fore-and-afters and called
'four-and-halfters; for I'll be hanged if this thing can do more than
four and a half knots, even in half a gale of wind, all sail set and a
smooth sea." But if the "four-and-halfters," as they were thenceforth
designated in the Western Pacific, were useless in regard to su