Vaguely he remembered reading years ago a touching piece called the “Song of the Shirt.”  It was all very well making songs about poor women.  The granddaughter of Colonel Whalley, the landlady of a boarding-house!  Pooh!  He replaced his hat, dived into two pockets, and stopping a moment to apply a flaring match to the end of a cheap cheroot, blew an embittered cloud of smoke at a world that could hold such surprises.

Of one thing he was certain—­that she was the own child of a clever mother.  Now he had got over the wrench of parting with his ship, he perceived clearly that such a step had been unavoidable.  Perhaps he had been growing aware of it all along with an unconfessed knowledge.  But she, far away there, must have had an intuitive perception of it, with the pluck to face that truth and the courage to speak out—­all the qualities which had made her mother a woman of such excellent counsel.

It would have had to come to that in the end!  It was fortunate she had forced his hand.  In another year or two it would have been an utterly barren sale.  To keep the ship going he had been involving himself deeper every year.  He was defenseless before the insidious work of adversity, to whose more open assaults he could present a firm front; like a cliff that stands unmoved the open battering of the sea, with a lofty ignorance of the treacherous backwash undermining its base.  As it was, every liability satisfied, her request answered, and owing no man a penny, there remained to him from the proceeds a sum of five hundred pounds put away safely.  In addition he had upon his person some forty odd dollars—­enough to pay his hotel bill, providing he did not linger too long in the modest bedroom where he had taken refuge.

Scantily furnished, and with a waxed floor, it opened into one of the side-verandas.  The straggling building of bricks, as airy as a bird-cage, resounded with the incessant flapping of rattan screens worried by the wind between the white-washed square pillars of the sea-front.  The rooms were lofty, a ripple of sunshine flowed over the ceilings; and the periodical invasions of tourists from some passenger steamer in the harbor flitted through the wind-swept dusk of the apartments with the tumult of their unfamiliar voices and impermanent presences, like relays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong round the earth without leaving a trace.  The babble of their irruptions ebbed out as suddenly as it had arisen; the draughty corridors and the long chairs of the verandas knew their sight-seeing hurry or their prostrate repose no more; and Captain Whalley, substantial and dignified, left well-nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted skurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view, like a forlorn traveler without a home.  In the solitude of his room he smoked thoughtfully, gazing at the two sea-chests which held all that he could call his own in this world.  A thick roll of charts in a sheath of sailcloth leaned