with admiration before the progress of the work.  You could almost smell these roses, he declared, sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty than usual in tackling his food.  But there was nothing of the sort to interfere with his enjoyment of her singing.  “Mrs. Whalley is a regular out-and-out nightingale, sir,” he would pronounce with a judicial air after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the piece.  In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in the cabin.  On the very day they got engaged he had written to London for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it reached them, coming out round the Cape.  The big case made part of the first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor—­an event that to the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as the dark ages of history.  But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow.  He had to close her eyes himself.  She went away from under the ensign like a sailor’s wife, a sailor herself at heart.  He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his voice.  When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten, impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red granite in a shower.  It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.  He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember much of what happened for the next few days.  An elderly sailor of the crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child out of one of her black skirts.

He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish stream.  It will break out and flow over a man’s troubles, it will close upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has gone to the bottom.  And the world is not bad.  People had been very kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor.  It was she who volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to England (something of a journey in those days, even by the overland mail route) with her own girls to finish her education.  It was ten years before he saw her again.

As a little child she had never been frightened of bad weather; she would beg to be taken up on deck in the bosom of his oilskin coat to watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the Condor.  The swirl and crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless delight.  “A good boy spoiled,” he used to say of her in joke.  He had named her Ivy because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated by a vague association of ideas.  She had twined herself tightly round his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little, that in the nature of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else.  But he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.