“Don't say that, Mrs. Liardet. If you'll allow me, I'll always be a friend. And, as I thought it would be hard for you to have to spend the little that Liardet left you, I have made arrangements for you to draw a few pounds whenever you need it from the agents. And as long as ever I have a pound in the world, Dave Liardet's wife——”
“Wife!” and the blue eyes flashed angrily. “He is dead and I am free. Why do you always talk of him? I hate the name. I hated him—a coarse, money-loving——”
“Stop!”
Russell stepped forward. “Good-bye, Mrs. Liardet. I hold to what I have said. But the man that you call coarse and money-loving died in trying to make it for you. And he was a good, honest man, and I can't stay here and hear his memory abused by the woman he loved better than life.” And then he turned to go, but stopped, and, with a scarlet face, said, “Of course you're a lady and wouldn't do anything not right and straight, so I know that if you intend to marry again you'll send me word; but if you don't, why, of course, I'll be proud and glad to stand by you in money matters. I'm sure poor Dave would have done the same for my wife if I had got that knife into me instead of him.”
Nell Liardet, sitting with clenched hands and set teeth, said, in a hoarse voice, “Your wife! Are you married?”
“Well—er—yes, oh, yes. I have a—er—native wife at the Anchorites. Poor old Dave stood godfather to one of my little girls. God knows how anxious I am to get back to her.”
“Good bye, Mr. Russell!”
KENNEDY THE BOATSTEERER
Steering north-west from Samoa for six or seven hundred miles you will sight the Ellice Group—low-lying, palm-clad coral atolls fringed on the lee with shimmering sandy beaches. On the weather-side, exposed to the long sweep of the ocean-rollers, there are but short, black-looking reefs backed by irregular piles of loose, flat, sea-worn coral, thrown up and accumulating till its surface is brushed by the pendant leaves of the cocoanuts, only to be washed and swirled back seawards when the wind comes from the westward and sends a fierce sweeping current along the white beaches and black coral rocks alike.