Mr. Van Wyk had known him well, he said, and he could not believe in suicide.  Such an act would not have been in character with what he knew of the man.

“It is my opinion, too,” the lawyer agreed.  The general theory was that the captain had remained too long on board trying to save something of importance.  Perhaps the chart which would clear him, or else something of value in his cabin.  The painter of the boat had come adrift of itself it was supposed.  However, strange to say, some little time before that voyage poor Whalley had called in his office and had left with him a sealed envelope addressed to his daughter, to be forwarded to her in case of his death.  Still it was nothing very unusual, especially in a man of his age.  Mr. Van Wyk shook his head.  Captain Whalley looked good for a hundred years.

“Perfectly true,” assented the lawyer.  “The old fellow looked as though he had come into the world full-grown and with that long beard.  I could never, somehow, imagine him either younger or older—­don’t you know.  There was a sense of physical power about that man too.  And perhaps that was the secret of that something peculiar in his person which struck everybody who came in contact with him.  He looked indestructible by any ordinary means that put an end to the rest of us.  His deliberate, stately courtesy of manner was full of significance.  It was as though he were certain of having plenty of time for everything.  Yes, there was something indestructible about him; and the way he talked sometimes you might have thought he believed it himself.  When he called on me last with that letter he wanted me to take charge of, he was not depressed at all.  Perhaps a shade more deliberate in his talk and manner.  Not depressed in the least.  Had he a presentiment, I wonder?  Perhaps!  Still it seems a miserable end for such a striking figure.”

“Oh yes!  It was a miserable end,” Mr. Van Wyk said, with so much fervor that the lawyer looked up at him curiously; and afterwards, after parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance—­

“Queer person that Dutch tobacco-planter from Batu Beru.  Know anything of him?”

“Heaps of money,” answered the bank manager.  “I hear he’s going home by the next mail to form a company to take over his estates.  Another tobacco district thrown open.  He’s wise, I think.  These good times won’t last for ever.”

In the southern hemisphere Captain Whalley’s daughter had no presentiment of evil when she opened the envelope addressed to her in the lawyer’s handwriting.  She had received it in the afternoon; all the boarders had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in rugs to the waist.  The house was still, and the grayness of a cloudy day lay against the panes of three lofty windows.

In a shabby dining-room, where a faint cold smell of dishes lingered all the year round, sitting at the end of a long table surrounded by many chairs pushed in with their backs close against the edge of the perpetually laid table-cloth, she read the opening sentence:  “Most profound regret—­painful duty—­your father is no more—­in accordance with his instructions—­fatal casualty—­consolation—­no blame attached to his memory. . . .”