After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home.  What made him dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else, but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination “a rather poor stick”—­even in the matter of health.  He disliked his son-in-law’s studied civility perhaps more than his method of handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage.  But of his apprehensions he said nothing.  Only on the day of his departure, with the hall-door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into her eyes, he had said, “You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the chicks.  Mind you write to me openly.”  She had answered him by an almost imperceptible movement of her head.  She resembled her mother in the color of her eyes, and in character—­and also in this, that she understood him without many words.

Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters made Captain Whalley lift his white eye-brows.  For the rest he considered he was reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on demand whatever was needed.  He had not enjoyed himself so much in a way since his wife had died.  Characteristically enough his son-in-law’s punctuality in failure caused him at a distance to feel a sort of kindness towards the man.  The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be manifestly unfair.  No, no!  He knew well what that meant.  It was bad luck.  His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in his life too many good men—­seamen and others—­go under with the sheer weight of bad luck not to recognize the fatal signs.  For all that, he was cogitating on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he had to leave, when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first sound reached him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big failure came; and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of incredulity, of indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing to speak of to leave.

Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catastrophe, the unlucky man, away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game, and sat down—­in an invalid’s bath-chair at that too.  “He will never walk again,” wrote the wife.  For the first time in his life Captain Whalley was a bit staggered.

The Fair Maid had to go to work in bitter earnest now.  It was no longer a matter of preserving alive the memory of Dare-devil Harry Whalley in the Eastern Seas, or of keeping an old man in pocket-money and clothes, with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown in at the end of the year.  He would have to buckle-to, and keep her going hard on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at her stem and stern.