ony.

CHAPTER V. MAURICE FRERE'S GOOD ANGEL.

At this happy conclusion to his labours, Frere went down to comfort the
girl for whose sake he had suffered Rex to escape the gallows. On his
way he was met by a man who touched his hat, and asked to speak with
him an instant. This man was past middle age, owned a red brandy-beaten
face, and had in his gait and manner that nameless something that
denotes the seaman.

"Well, Blunt," says Frere, pausing with the impatient air of a man who
expects to hear bad news, "what is it now?"

"Only to tell you that it is all right, sir," says Blunt. "She's come
aboard again this morning."

"Come aboard again!" ejaculated Frere. "Why, I didn't know that she
had been ashore. Where did she go?" He spoke with an air of confident
authority, and Blunt--no longer the bluff tyrant of old--seemed to quail
before him. The trial of the mutineers of the Malabar had ruined Phineas
Blunt. Make what excuses he might, there was no concealing the fact that
Pine found him drunk in his cabin when he ought to have been attending
to his duties on deck, and the "authorities" could not, or would not,
pass over such a heinous breach of discipline. Captain Blunt--who, of
course, had his own version of the story--thus deprived of the honour of
bringing His Majesty's prisoners to His Majesty's colonies of New South
Wales and Van Diemen's Land, went on a whaling cruise to the South Seas.
The influence which Sarah Purfoy had acquired over him had, however,
irretrievably injured him. It was as though she had poisoned his moral
nature by the influence of a clever and wicked woman over a sensual
and dull-witted man. Blunt gradually sank lower and lower. He became
a drunkard, and was known as a man with a "grievance against the
Government". Captain Frere, having had occasion for him in some
capacity, had become in a manner his patron, and had got him the command
of a schooner trading from Sydney. On getting this command--not without
some wry faces on the part of the owner resident in Hobart Town--Blunt
had taken the temperance pledge for the space of twelve months, and was
a miserable dog in consequence. He was, however, a faithful henchman,
for he hoped by Frere's means to get some "Government billet"--the grand
object of all colonial sea captains of that epoch.

"Well, sir, she went ashore to see a friend," says Blunt, looking at the
sky and then at the earth.

"What friend?"

"The--the prisoner,