When Captain Carey went on his long journey into the unknown and uncharted land, the rest of the Careys tried in vain for a few months to be still a family, and did not succeed at all.  They clung as closely to one another as ever they could, but there was always a gap in the circle where father had been.  Some men, silent, unresponsive, absent-minded and especially absorbed in business, might drop out and not be missed, but Captain Carey was full of vitality, warmth, and high spirits.  It is strange so many men think that the possession of a child makes them a father; it does not; but it is a curious and very general misapprehension.  Captain Carey was a boy with his boys, and a gallant lover with his girls; to his wife—­oh! we will not even touch upon that ground; she never did, to any one or anything but her own heart!  Such an one could never disappear from memory, such a loss could never be made wholly good.  The only thing to do was to remember father’s pride and justify it, to recall his care for mother and take his place so far as might be; the only thing for all, as the months went on, was to be what mother called the three b’s,—­brave, bright, and busy.

To be the last was by far the easiest, for the earliest effort at economy had been the reluctant dismissal of Joanna, the chambermaid.  In old-fashioned novels the devoted servant always insisted on remaining without wages, but this story concerns itself with life at a later date.  Joanna wept at the thought of leaving, but she never thought of the romantic and illogical expedient of staying on without compensation.

Captain Carey’s salary had been five thousand dollars, or rather was to have been, for he had only attained his promotion three months before his death.  There would have been an extra five hundred dollars a year when he was at sea, and on the strength of this addition to their former income he intended to increase the amount of his life insurance, but it had not yet been done when the sudden illness seized him, an illness that began so gently and innocently and terminated with such sudden and unexpected fatality.

The life insurance, such as it was, must be put into the bank for emergencies.  Mrs. Carey realized that that was the only proper thing to do when there were four children under fifteen to be considered.  The pressing question, however, was how to keep it in the bank, and subsist on a captain’s pension of thirty dollars a month.  There was the ten thousand, hers and the Captain’s, in Allan Carey’s business, but Allan was seriously ill with nervous prostration, and no money put into his business ever had come out, even in a modified form.  The Admiral was at the other end of the world, and even had he been near at hand Mrs. Carey would never have confided the family difficulties to him.  She could hardly have allowed him even to tide her over her immediate pressing anxieties, remembering his invalid sister and his many responsibilities.  No, the years until Gilbert was able to help, or Nancy old enough to use her talents, or the years before the money invested with Allan would bring dividends, those must be years of self-sacrifice on everybody’s part; and more even than that, they must be fruitful years, in which not mere saving and economizing, but earning, would be necessary.