“If you had seen him you would have understood at once how impossible it was for Freya to have ever loved that man.  Well, well.  I don’t say.  She might have—­something.  She was lonely, you know.  But really to go away with him!  Never!  Madness.  She was too sensible . . .  I began to reproach him gently.  And by and by he turns on me.  ’Write to you!  What about?  Come to her!  What with?  If I had been a man I would have carried her off, but she made a child, a happy child, of me.  Tell her that the day the only thing I had belonging to me in the world perished on this reef I discovered that I had no power over her. . .  Has she come here with you?’ he shouts, blazing at me suddenly with his hollow eyes.  I shook my head.  Come with me, indeed!  Anaemia!  ’Aha!  You see?  Go away, then, old man, and leave me alone here with that ghost,’ he says, jerking his head at the wreck of his brig.

“Mad!  It was getting dusk.  I did not care to stop any longer all by myself with that man in that lonely place.  I was not going to tell him of Freya’s illness.  Anaemia!  What was the good?  Mad!  And what sort of husband would he have made, anyhow, for a sensible girl like Freya?  Why, even my little property I could not have left them.  The Dutch authorities would never have allowed an Englishman to settle there.  It was not sold then.  My man Mahmat, you know, was looking after it for me.  Later on I let it go for a tenth of its value to a Dutch half-caste.  But never mind.  It was nothing to me then.  Yes; I went away from him.  I caught the return mail-boat.  I told everything to Freya.  ‘He’s mad,’ I said; ‘and, my dear, the only thing he loved was his brig.’

“‘Perhaps,’ she says to herself, looking straight away—­her eyes were nearly as hollow as his—­’perhaps it is true.  Yes!  I would never allow him any power over me.’”

Old Nelson paused.  I sat fascinated, and feeling a little cold in that room with a blazing fire.

“So you see,” he continued, “she never really cared for him.  Much too sensible.  I took her away to Hong Kong.  Change of climate, they said.  Oh, these doctors!  My God!  Winter time!  There came ten days of cold mists and wind and rain.  Pneumonia.  But look here!  We talked a lot together.  Days and evenings.  Who else had she? . . .  She talked a lot to me, my own girl.  Sometimes she would laugh a little.  Look at me and laugh a little—­”

I shuddered.  He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled moodiness.

“She would say:  ’I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to you, papa.’  And I would say:  ’Of course, my dear.  You could not have meant it.’  She would lie quiet and then say:  ‘I wonder?’ And sometimes, ‘I’ve been really a coward,’ she would tell me.  You know, sick people they say things.  And so she would say too:  ’I’ve been conceited, headstrong, capricious.  I sought my own gratification.  I was selfish or afraid.’ . . .  But sick people, you know, they say anything.  And once, after lying silent almost all day, she said:  ’Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would not have gone.  Perhaps!  I don’t know,’ she cried.  ’Draw the curtain, papa.  Shut the sea out.  It reproaches me with my folly.’” He gasped and paused.