elegram came, 'Daughter, both doing well,' he ordered grog
for all hands, took me up town, and stood champagne to every Tom, Dick,
and Harry in the Verdi Bar. I got him down to the harbour in a carriage
and he wanted to fight me because I laughed when he told the driver that
he was going to call the baby Angelina Madeline Evans.

"He did, too. Life for me became impregnated with Madeline and Angelina
as with a domestic odour. That marvellous child haunted my hours of
leisure long before I had ever seen her. As the months and years passed,
and Jack and I fared up and down the world together, I sometimes
wondered whether we hadn't both married Madeline. Jack was a model
husband. The notion that any other woman existed, or that any other man
could love a woman as he loved Madeline, never entered his head. He was
perfectly satisfied as long as one sat and listened to him talking about
Madeline. I believe he would have urged me to go and do likewise, if he
hadn't been convinced that no more Madelines were available. I believe,
too, he thought me a bit of an ass to take him down and introduce him
instead of marrying her myself. But as you will see, she and I were not
affinities.

"So life went on, and now I am coming to the time when Captain
Macedoine's daughter comes into the thing. Oh, no, I haven't forgotten
what I was talking about. Time passed, and one voyage we left home with
Jack in an anxious frame of mind. The child was about five years old
then and she was sick. Something the matter with her throat. Jack was
like a caged bear when we got to sea. There was no wireless then, you
know. You would have thought there had never been a sick child on earth
before. 'Fred,' he would say, 'I left orders--get the best advice, best
of everything. I don't give a damn what it costs,' And he'd prance to
and fro. He never looked at the ship. If we dropped a knot below our
customary two hundred a day, he'd be in my room growling, 'Aren't we
ever goin' to get to Alexandria, Fred?' When we did get there he fled up
to the post office to get his mail--forgot all about ours of course.
'_Not yet out of danger--diphtheria_,' so ran the telegram in reply to
his own frantic message. I never had such a time in my life. He was like
a man demented. He would catch me by the shoulder and coat-collar and
glare at me out of his bulging, blood-shot brown eyes, his fat cheeks
all drawn into pouches, and stutter, 'Fred, this is the end o' me. If I
lose