A tall old lady, whose kindly and still handsome face bore unmistakable signs of former beauty, rose from a sewing-machine at which she had been working, with a start of surprise.
“What! Arthur? Why, so it is. But I should never have known you, you’re so altered. Ah, I always said we should see you out here again,” she continued, shaking his hand cordially.
The stranger smiled, and a very pleasant smile it was.
“Well, yes, so you did, Mrs Brathwaite; but at least I have the faculty of knowing when and where I am well off,” he said, really touched by the genuine warmth of his reception.
“So you’ve been all over the world since we saw you last—to Australia and back?” she went on. “And then the last thing we heard of you was that you had gone to America.”
“I attempted to; but Providence, or rather the blunder-headed lookout on board a homeward-bound liner, willed otherwise.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why! that the said idiotically-handled craft collided with ours, two days out, cutting her down to the water’s edge and sinking her in thirteen minutes. I and twenty-four others were picked up, but the rest went to Davy Jones’s locker. There weren’t many more of them, though, for it was a small boat, and I was nearly the only passenger.”
“Oh! And you didn’t try the voyage again?” said Mrs Brathwaite, in subdued tones. She was colonial born, and in her own element as brave a woman as ever stepped. In the earlier frontier wars she had stood by her husband’s side within the laager and loaded his guns for him, while the conflict waxed long and desperate, and the night was ablaze with the flash of volleys, and the air was heavy with asphyxiating smoke, and the detonating crash of musketry and the battle-shouts of the savage foe, and had never flinched. But she had a shuddering horror of the sea, and would almost have gone through all her terrible experiences again rather than trust herself for one hour on its smiling, treacherous expanse.
“Well, no; I didn’t,” he answered. “I took it as an omen, and concluded to dismiss the Far West in favour of the ‘Sunny South.’ So here I am.”