The hotel in which Barry was living was quite near the wharves of the Circular Quay. He had taken up his quarters there after the Mahina had been sold, for as old Watson was an active and energetic chief officer there was no need for him to live on board the new vessel. During the time he had been living on shore he had met Mrs. Tracey frequently; for he acted as her business agent, and she relied upon him with the most implicit confidence. When he suggested that the brig should be sold and another vessel bought she eagerly acquiesced on the one condition that he would take command.
"Of course I will," he said, "and very glad to do so, Mrs. Tracey. She is a beautiful little barque and not a bit too big. You will see how she can sail when you pay a visit to Arrecifos next year."
"I almost wish I were going this time, Captain Barry. Till next year seems a long, long time to wait, and what I should do without Toea to talk to I can't imagine. I suppose I shall grow more reconciled by and by."
"You will make many friends, Mrs. Tracey."
Her cheeks reddened slightly.
"Friends! No, not friends—merely people who want to know me because I am rich. And I don't want to make friends. The other afternoon a Mrs. Bell-Lovatt and her two daughters called to see me, and Mrs. Bell-Lovatt simply gushed over me for half an hour and made me feel quite sick with her odious flattery. I knew the girls when I was at school in Melbourne, but I've never seen them since and had no wish to see them again."
Barry laughed. "You'll have to put up with a good deal of that sort of thing, I fear. Even I, myself, have discovered that I unknowingly possessed heaps of friends. When I go into the Exchange now, a dozen or more men—shipowners, brokers, and others—insist on shaking hands with me and asking me to dinner. When I was in Sydney last and was badly in want of a berth no less than three of these very men metaphorically kicked me out of their offices when I applied to them. But now that I am agent and manager to 'the rich Mrs. Tracey' they can't find words to express their admiration of my talents and all-round virtues."
"Ah, well. We must not mind these things, I suppose. But I wish I were a man—I should at least escape being called upon and kissed by 'catty' women like Mrs. Bell-Lovatt."
Not once since he returned had Barry caught sight of the woman he had hoped to call his wife, and as the days went by he thought less and less of her and more of Alice Tracey. And his would indeed have been a hard, unimpressionable nature not to have yielded the influence she was surely, but slowly, exercising upon him. She honestly tried to attract him, and now that he was a free man she did not mean to let him go away to sea again without trying to let him understand that she would feel the loss of his society very much.