He had an office in Water Street, a warehouse near Huskisson Dock, and a house furnished with mid-Victorian solidity and ugliness out at Princes' Park. A sister, Mrs. Craven, whose unsatisfactory husband had conveniently died on the Coast, kept house for him, and as she voted marriage a failure, Godfrey professed himself as quite ready to take her verdict and was not anxious to dabble in dangerous experiments. Finally, as Godfrey O'Neill discovered, after a two years' trial of the style of living that suited him at Princes' Park, that it cost him just £900 a year, he saw very little use in bestirring himself to earn more. He quite admitted that there were other luxuries in the world that he did not indulge in. He might have kept horses, for instance; but he happened to dislike them. He might have had a French chef; only plain roast beef and plain roast mutton appealed more to his appetite, and a plain British cook at £20 a year produced these exactly to his taste. He might have had a larger house, but frankly he did not want one. So he went down to the office in Water Street every other day, and ceased to stir the business there when it showed any signs of averaging a more than £1,500 profit for any one year, not because he objected to additional wealth, but because he far preferred to play whist to pursuing money. One may here own freely that Godfrey O'Neill was an active member of no less than five whist quartettes which met at clubs and houses, and there was the amusement which after long search he had discovered pleased him best. In the comfortable ugly house in Princes' Park, besides Godfrey and Mrs. Craven, and the two servants, there was a child who afterwards developed into the Kate O'Neill of these memoirs. Godfrey O'Neill brought her home on the last visit he made to West Africa. She was then aged, at a theoretical reckoning, three years, and she was more fluent in the Okky tongue than in English. She had never worn shoes till Godfrey bought her a pair in Las Palmas on the voyage home. "Is she white?" Mrs. Craven had asked. "White, clean through," Godfrey had assured her. "Then who are her people?" "That I shall not tell even you. Her mother is dead. Her father has gone under. He was a very clever man once, though I must say he used to be more high and mighty than I cared about on the rare occasions that I met him. But, as I say, he's gone under, hopelessly." "And presently," said Mrs. Craven, "when we get this little wild thing tamed, and clothed, and teach her to speak English and go to church, up will come some drunken reprobate to take her away again."