g time to wait, and what I should do without Toea to
talk to I can't imagine. I suppose I shall grow more reconciled by and
by."

"You will make many friends, Mrs. Tracey."

Her cheeks reddened slightly.

"Friends! No, not friends--merely people who want to know me because I
am rich. And I don't want to make friends. The other afternoon a Mrs.
Bell-Lovatt and her two daughters called to see me, and Mrs.
Bell-Lovatt simply gushed over me for half an hour and made me feel
quite sick with her odious flattery. I knew the girls when I was at
school in Melbourne, but I've never seen them since and had no wish to
see them again."

Barry laughed. "You'll have to put up with a good deal of that sort of
thing, I fear. Even I, myself, have discovered that I unknowingly
possessed heaps of friends. When I go into the Exchange now, a dozen
or more men--shipowners, brokers, and others--insist on shaking hands
with me and asking me to dinner. When I was in Sydney last and was
badly in want of a berth no less than three of these very men
metaphorically kicked me out of their offices when I applied to them.
But now that I am agent and manager to 'the rich Mrs. Tracey' they
can't find words to express their admiration of my talents and
all-round virtues."

"Ah, well. We must not mind these things, I suppose. But I wish I
were a man--I should at least escape being called upon and kissed by
'catty' women like Mrs. Bell-Lovatt."

Not once since he returned had Barry caught sight of the woman he had
hoped to call his wife, and as the days went by he thought less and
less of her and more of Alice Tracey. And his would indeed have been a
hard, unimpressionable nature not to have yielded the influence she was
surely, but slowly, exercising upon him. She honestly tried to attract
him, and now that he was a free man she did not mean to let him go away
to sea again without trying to let him understand that she would feel
the loss of his society very much.

"If he cared for me ever so much he wouldn't tell me," she thought to
herself, "he is that sort of man, I'm sure. If I had no money it would
be different. Ah, well, I must wait."

Old Watson, in his own quiet way, was helping matters on; for he
conceived quite a sincere admiration for the young widow, and one day
he bluntly told Barry that she was "only waiting to be asked. And
there'll be a hungry crowd hanging around her once you are away at sea,
my boy."

"She's to