She seemed to cling to him when, next morning, the time came for him to go.
"You will come again?" she implored him, in a trembling whisper. "You will come here when you return next time?"
"Oh, surely," he replied, whispering too, and to the full as deeply moved. But when he got away it was to other lands that he turned his eyes, in the search for new interests to occupy his lonely life. With Lily and the baby dead, and Deborah Pennycuick given to another man, Australia had no more hold on him. His first letter to Redford notified that he had changed into another line, and that the name of his new ship was the DOVEDALE. She traded to the West Indies.
He forgot to write again when, not very long afterwards, he went back to his old line, at the invitation of the Company, as captain of the ship on which he had served as mate.
CHAPTER IX.
"'Dovedale'—DOVEDALE—hullo!" Mr Pennycuick broke the silence of his newspaper reading. "Why, isn't that—Well, upon my soul! it does seem as if some folks were born unlucky. Here's that poor young fellow—first he loses a charming wife, before he's been married any time, and then the finest child going, and now here he's gone himself, before his prime, with no end of a career before him—"
"Who?" cried Deb from the tea-table, where she was helping herself to a hot cake.
"Young Carey—our Carey; oh, it's him all right, worse luck! His ship's been wrecked, and only two A.B.s saved to tell the tale. Look here."
He passed the newspaper, pressed under his broad thumb.