w she would
need it sooner or later. She was not a bad woman when she left me,
and she is not now, unless he has made her so. She is only an easily
persuaded, pleasure-loving woman, and when my father was forced into
bankruptcy and we all suffered together, she blamed me for giving up
what money I had in trying to straighten out his affairs; and then our
infant daughter died, and that so upset her mind that when Dalton came
along she let everything go. That is one solution of it--the one which
her friends give out. I will tell you the truth. It is that I was twenty
years older than she, that she loved me as a young girl loves an older
man who had been brought up almost in her own family, for our properties
adjoined, and that when she woke up, it was to find out that I was not
the man she would have married had she been given a few more years' time
in which to make up her mind.

"When she ran away I lost my bearings. I used to sit in my room in the
club for hours at a time, staring at the morning paper, never seeing the
print; thinking only of my wife and our life together--all of it, from
the day we were married. I recalled her childish nature, her fits of
sudden temper always ending in tears, and her wilfulness. Then my own
responsibility loomed up. To let this child go to the devil would be
a crime. When this idea became firmly set in my mind, I determined to
follow her no matter what she had done or where she had gone.

"I had meant to go to Australia and look after sheep--I knew something
about them--but I changed my plans when I overheard a conversation at
my club and concluded that Dalton had brought her here--although the
conversation itself was only the repetition of a rumor. Since then I
have found out that they are both here, or were some six months ago.

"You can understand, now, why I am living at Mrs. Cleary's and working
in Mr. Kling's store. I had but a few pounds left after paying my
passage and there was no one from whom I could borrow, even if I had
been so disposed; so work of some kind was necessary. It may be just as
well for me to tell you, too, that nobody at home knows where I am,
and that but two persons in New York know me at all. One is a man named
Carlin, who served on one of my father-in-law's vessels, and the other
is his sister Martha, who was a nurse in my wife's family.

"Dalton, so I understood, had considerable money when he left, enough to
last him some months, and until yesterday