"Poor wretch! Another victim of fate! I wonder who he could have been."
"That is more than anyone will ever know, until the last great Judgment Day. But, believe me, he is not the only one of that class out here. I could tell you of half a dozen others that I remember. There was Bombay Pete; it was said he was a fashionable preacher in London, and was nearly made a bishop. He died—bewitched, he said—in a Kanaka's hut over yonder behind the settlement. Then there was the Gray Apollo—but who he was nobody ever knew; at any rate he was the handsomest and most reckless man on the island until he was knifed in the Phillipines; and the man from New Guinea; and Sacramento Dick; and the Scholar; and John Garfitt, who turned out to be a lord. Oh, I could tell you of dozens of others. Poor miserable, miserable men."
"You have a sympathy for them, then?"
"Who could help it? I pity them from the bottom of my heart. Fancy their degradation. Fancy having been brought up in the enjoyment of every luxury, started with every advantage in life, and then to come out here to consort with all the riff-raff of the world and to die, cut off from kith and kin, in some hovel over yonder. It is too awful."
Ellison sighed. She looked at him, and then said very softly:
"Mr. Ellison, I do not want to pry into your secret, but is there no hope for you?"
He appeared not to have heard her. A great temptation was upon him. He was going away to-morrow: she would never see him again. She had evidently a romantic interest in these shattered lives—could he not allow himself the enjoyment of that sympathy just for a few brief hours? Why not? Ah, yes, why not?
"Miss McCartney," he said, after a long pause, "do you know, while you were away to-night, and I was sitting waiting for you, I subjected myself to a severe cross-examination?"
"On what subject?"
"Partly yourself, partly myself."