be seen any day swinging his silver-headed Malacca cane, and pacing along the suburban roads with the same measured gait with which he had been wont to tread the poop of his flagship.  He wore a good service stripe upon his cheek, for on one side it was pitted and scarred where a spurt of gravel knocked up by a round-shot had struck him thirty years before, when he served in the Lancaster gun-battery.  Yet he was hale and sound, and though he was fifteen years senior to his friend the Doctor, he might have passed as the younger man.

Mrs. Hay Denver’s life had been a very broken one, and her record upon land represented a greater amount of endurance and self-sacrifice than his upon the sea.  They had been together for four months after their marriage, and then had come a hiatus of four years, during which he was flitting about between St. Helena and the Oil Rivers in a gunboat.  Then came a blessed year of peace and domesticity, to be followed by nine years, with only a three months’ break, five upon the Pacific station, and four on the East Indian.  After that was a respite in the shape of five years in the Channel squadron, with periodical runs home, and then again he was off to the Mediterranean for three years and to Halifax for four.  Now, at last, however, this old married couple, who were still almost strangers to one another, had come together in Norwood, where, if their short day had been chequered and broken, the evening at least promised to be sweet and mellow.  In person Mrs. Hay Denver was tall and stout, with a bright, round, ruddy-cheeked face still pretty, with a gracious, matronly comeliness.  Her whole life was a round of devotion and of love, which was divided between her husband and her only son, Harold.

This son it was who kept them in the neighborhood of London, for the Admiral was as fond of ships and of salt water as ever, and was as happy in the sheets of a two-ton yacht as on the bridge of his sixteen-knot monitor.  Had he been untied, the Devonshire or Hampshire coast would certainly have been his choice.  There was Harold, however, and Harold’s interests were their chief care.  Harold was four-and-twenty now.  Three years before he had been taken in hand by an acquaintance of his father’s, the head of a considerable firm of stock-brokers, and fairly launched upon ’Change.  His three hundred guinea entrance fee paid, his three sureties of five hundred pounds each found, his name approved by the Committee, and all other formalities complied with, he found himself whirling round, an insignificant unit, in the vortex of the money market of the world.  There, under the guidance of his father’s friend, he was instructed in the mysteries of bulling and of bearing, in the strange usages of ’Change in the intricacies of carrying over and of transferring.  He learned to know where to place his clients’ money, which of the jobbers would make a price in New Zealands, and which would touch nothing but American