ead. She resembled her mother in
the color of her eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she
understood him without many words.

Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters made Captain
Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For the rest he considered he was
reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on
demand whatever was needed. He had not enjoyed himself so much in a
way since his wife had died. Characteristically enough his son-in-law's
punctuality in failure caused him at a distance to feel a sort of
kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on
a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be
manifestly unfair. No, no! He knew well what that meant. It was bad
luck. His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in his life too
many good men--seamen and others--go under with the sheer weight of bad
luck not to recognize the fatal signs. For all that, he was cogitating
on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he had to leave,
when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first sound reached
him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big failure came;
and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of incredulity, of
indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing to speak of
to leave.

Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catastrophe, the unlucky
man, away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game, and sat
down--in an invalid's bath-chair at that too. "He will never walk
again," wrote the wife. For the first time in his life Captain Whalley
was a bit staggered.

The Fair Maid had to go to work in bitter earnest now. It was no longer
a matter of preserving alive the memory of Dare-devil Harry Whalley in
the Eastern Seas, or of keeping an old man in pocket-money and clothes,
with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown in at
the end of the year. He would have to buckle-to, and keep her going hard
on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at her stem
and stern.

This necessity opened his eyes to the fundamental changes of the world.
Of his past only the familiar names remained, here and there, but
the things and the men, as he had known them, were gone. The name of
Gardner, Patteson, & Co. was still displayed on the walls of warehouses
by the waterside, on the brass plates and window-panes in the business
quarters of more than one Eastern p