oy)
with his pockets full of sovereigns. He would buy himself a house; his
married sisters, their husbands, his old workshop chums, would render
him infinite homage. There would be nothing to think of. His word would
be law. He had been out of work for a long time before he won his prize,
and he remembered how Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley),
the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, had
cringed joyfully before him in the evening, when the news had come.
Poor Charley, though he made his living by ministering to various abject
vices, gave credit for their food to many a piece of white wreckage. He
was naively overjoyed at the idea of his old bills being paid, and
he reckoned confidently on a spell of festivities in the cavernous
grog-shop downstairs. Massy remembered the curious, respectful looks of
the "trashy" white men in the place. His heart had swelled within him.
Massy had left Charley's infamous den directly he had realized the
possibilities open to him, and with his nose in the air. Afterwards the
memory of these adulations was a great sadness.

This was the true power of money,--and no trouble with it, nor any
thinking required either. He thought with difficulty and felt vividly;
to his blunt brain the problems offered by any ordered scheme of life
seemed in their cruel toughness to have been put in his way by the
obvious malevolence of men. As a shipowner everyone had conspired to
make him a nobody. How could he have been such a fool as to purchase
that accursed ship. He had been abominably swindled; there was no end
to this swindling; and as the difficulties of his improvident ambition
gathered thicker round him, he really came to hate everybody he had
ever come in contact with. A temper naturally irritable and an amazing
sensitiveness to the claims of his own personality had ended by making
of life for him a sort of inferno--a place where his lost soul had been
given up to the torment of savage brooding.

But he had never hated anyone so much as that old man who had turned up
one evening to save him from an utter disaster,--from the conspiracy of
the wretched sailors. He seemed to have fallen on board from the sky.
His footsteps echoed on the empty steamer, and the strange deep-toned
voice on deck repeating interrogatively the words, "Mr. Massy, Mr. Massy
there?" had been startling like a wonder. And coming up from the depths
of the cold engine-room, where he had been pot