ur our impatience was growing
greater. In less than two days, all being well, we should be at our
destination, and twenty-four hours after that, if our fortune proved in
the ascendant, we ought to be on our way back with Phyllis in our
possession once more. And what this would mean to me I can only leave
you to guess.

One morning, just as the faint outline of the coast of Aneityum was
peering up over the horizon ahead, Wetherell and I chanced to be sitting
in the bows. The sea was as smooth as glass, and the tinkling of the
water round the little vessel's nose as she turned it off in snowy lines
from either bow, was the only sound to be heard. As usual the
conversation, after wandering into other topics, came back to the
subject nearest our hearts. This led us to make a few remarks anent
Nikola and his character. I could not help asking him for an
explanation.

"You want to know how it is that I am so frightened of Nikola?" he
asked. "Well, to give you my reason will necessitate my telling you a
story. I don't mind doing that at all, but what I am afraid of is that
you may be inclined to doubt its probability. However, if you want to
hear it you shall."

"I should like to above all things," I replied. "I have been longing to
ask you about it for some time past, but could not quite screw up my
courage."

"Well, in the first place," Mr. Wetherell said, "you must understand
that before I became a Minister of the Crown, or indeed a Member of
Parliament at all, I was a barrister with a fairly remunerative
practice. That was before my wife's death and when Phyllis was at
school. Up to the time I am going to tell you about I had taken part in
no very sensational case. But my opportunity for earning notoriety was,
though I did not know it, near at hand. One day I was briefed to defend
a man accused of the murder of a Chinaman aboard a Sydney vessel on a
voyage from Shanghai. At first there seemed to be no doubt at all as to
his guilt, but by a singular chance, with the details of which I will
not bore you, I hit upon a scheme which got him off. I remember the man
perfectly, and a queer fellow he was, half-witted, I thought, and at the
time of the trial within an ace of dying of consumption. His gratitude
was the more pathetic because he had not the wherewithal to pay me.
However, he made it up to me in another way.

"One wet night, a couple of months or so after the trial, I was sitting
in my drawing-room listening to m