at Tom had been drowned at sea,
that Laurance would be back in Sydney in a month or two and give her all
particulars, and that she was not utterly friendless and alone in the
world.

Within a month of Harry Laurance's return she began to think more of him
and of his goodness to her, than of her dead husband--and then gratitude
became love. She was only a poor little woman, and of a weakly,
irresolute nature, unable to think for herself, and unfitted to battle
alone with the world and poverty. So one day when Laurance, whose big
heart was full of love and pity for her, asked her to be his wife, she
gave him a happy smile and said 'Yes.' Before a second month had passed
they were quietly married.

Masters, meanwhile, had been pursued by the demon of ill-luck. When the
schooner reached Honolulu, he, a mere wreck, physically and mentally, of
his former self, had been carried ashore to the hospital, and was making
a slow recovery, when the Sydney whaling brig, _Wild Wave_ came into
port with some of her crew injured by a boat accident. One of the men
was placed in a bed next to that occupied by Masters, and one day his
captain came to see him and brought him some colonial newspapers which
had just arrived.

'Here, mate,' said the sailor, tossing one of the papers over to
Masters, 'you're a Sydney man, and there's a Sydney newspaper.'

Masters took up the paper, and the first lines he read were these:--

'Laurance--Masters. On the 10th inst., at the Scots Church, Church Hill,
Henry A. Laurance to Helen, widow of the late Thomas Masters.'

Possibly, had he been well enough to have returned to Sydney, he would
have gone back and made three persons' lives unhappy. But, although an
Englishman, he had not the rigidly conventional idea that the divorce
court was part of the machinery of the Wrath of God against women who
unknowingly committed bigamy, and ought to be availed of by injured
husbands. So, instead of having a relapse, he pulled himself together,
left the hospital, and got placidly drunk, and concluded, when he became
sober, not to disturb them.

'I suppose neither of them is to blame,' he thought. 'How were either
of them to know that I was not drowned?... And then poor little Nell had
only ten shillings a week to live upon until I came back.'

Still, he would have been better pleased had Harry Laurance been a
stranger to him--no man cares to know his successor in such a matter.
By-and-by he worked his passage