“She sent the girl out with some food for me in the verandah; and we watched the little one, she inside and I out. I couldn’t hear anything in the room, the wind roared and shook the verandah so; but I could see the child was breathing slower. Then my wife put her hand under the wrap to feel its little feet.” He broke off, and then added:
“I didn’t see the end. One of the men came up to say they had signalled for the doctor from the town. So I had to start back. The gig tore through the black seas before the gale. It was a pitch dark night, about eight when I started. I got to Mrs. Rogers just in time. The youngster was born about midnight. The mother did very well, and when I left, about four in the morning, the bay was like a sheet of glass, and the sun rising without a cloud over the cliffs. The jetty had been washed away, all but the stonework, and my men had had to beach our boat right up on the road.
“When I got back, I found the wife on the lookout by the lighthouse. She had heard nothing of us, of course, since I left the night before.”
“That was a hardish day’s work,” said the skipper—”thirty hours of it.
“Well, I was not sorry to get my boots off, and get some sleep, before I started on my round. I’d a longish ride that day to the telegraph construction camp, over the hill there,” said Dr. Gladman, getting up from the table and taking his cap.
“And your little girl—doctor?” said my wife, suddenly appearing at her cabin door, tears on her cheek and a little gasp in her voice.
“It was dead, ma’am,” said the father, and turned to the companion and went on deck.
We saw very little more of Dr. Gladman while we were in Albany. My wife and her sister went up to the lighthouse and called on his wife. They came away charmed with her and the dainty little household she reigned over. My wife was enthusiastic over the trim garden, cool little parlour, and “exquisitely clean kitchen,” and “would you believe it,” she said, “she has only one maid-servant, and that a girl of seventeen!”
“I think,” she said impressively, stopping in our walk up and down the deck, as we were taking our last turn that night after leaving Albany, gliding past the shadowy coast under the wonderful Southern Cross—”I think they are both splendid, those Gladmans.”
A burly figure leaning over the bulwarks, puffing clouds of smoke into the still night air, turned round, and the captain’s voice said: