feel your pulse."

He held out his hand to me, and I laid my fingers upon his wrist.
Contrary to what I had expected, I found the skin to be cool and moist,
and the pulse beneath it beating with the steadiness and regularity of a
machine.

"Umph! there doesn't seem to be very much wrong there," I admitted.
"But I didn't know you were a married man, Roberts; I understood you
once to say that you were quite alone in the world--not a soul belonging
to you."

"Quite right, sir; that's the exact truth," returned the mate. "But I
had a wife once, sir; as sweet, true, and tender-hearted a little woman
as you ever met, I'll be bound. And pretty, she was, too. My little
Nellie--I only had her six months, sir.

"We were spliced early in the spring; and I stayed ashore and spent the
whole summer and well into the autumn with her; six months--six blessed,
happy, joyous months with the sweetest woman that ever lived. We were
all by ourselves, excepting for one servant maid, in a pretty little
house on the outskirts of Teignmouth. Ah! that was a time for a man to
look back upon for the rest of his life. Then by-and-by, when the
autumn days began to grow short, the cash began to grow short, too; and
I had to go to sea again to earn more. I'm not a particularly
soft-hearted man, as a rule, Captain Saint Leger, but I tell you, sir,
that that parting from Nellie was just as much as I could stand up
against: to be obliged to untwine her loving, clinging arms from about
my neck, and to deliberately turn away and leave her standing there by
the gate, crying her dear eyes out, was cruel work, sir; it was like
tearing my very heartstrings asunder. But it had to be done.

"Of course when we arrived at Durban--for it was while I was in the
Natal trade, in this same little barque--there were a couple of letters
waiting for me that had passed us on the road out; and every mail that
arrived while we were lying in the harbour brought me another, each more
cheerful than the last, because the time was passing away and bringing
our reunion nearer.

"And when at last I got home again, sir, all that they had to show me
was my darling's new-made grave. She had taken typhoid fever, died, and
was carried out of the house in her coffin at the moment that the
telegram announcing my arrival in England was handed in."

Something very like a sob seemed to rise in Roberts's throat and choke
him at this point in his story; but before I had time t