A fortnight or three weeks later the pilot had left the _Emperor of the Moon_, the lee main braces were manned, the ship was lying over under her canvas, the wind was well astern. Bella was on her way to India and her lover! Let us pass over this parting between mother and child, the fond embraces, the tears and sobs which accompanied that parting following after the dawn when we first made the girl's acquaintance, and following, too, that night of unrest and disturbing dreams. No description of such partings is necessary; many of us, young and old, men and women, have had to make them; to part from the loved, gray-haired mother who has sobbed on our breast ere we went forth to find our livelihood, if not our fortune, in a strange world; many of us have had to let the child of our longings and our hopes and prayers go forth from us who have sheltered and nurtured it--from us who have perhaps prayed God night and day that, in His mercy, it might never leave our side. We go away ourselves because we must; also they go from us because they must; and there is nothing but the same hope left in all our hearts--the hope that we shall not be forgotten--that, as the years roll by, those we have left behind will keep a warm spot for us in their memory, or that those who have left us behind will sometimes turn their thoughts back longingly to us in our desolation. It has to be, and it has to be borne; alas, that parting is the penalty we all have to pay for having ever been permitted to be together. And, so, across the seas, the stout old _Emperor of the Moon_ went; buffeting with the Channel, throwing aside the rough waves with her forefoot as though she despised them, sinking England and home behind her with every plunge she made. And at the moment that she was leaving the Lizard far away astern of her, and was running well out into the Atlantic, a telegram was delivered in Montmorency Road addressed to Bella, which was opened by her mother. A telegram signed 'Gilbert,' which ran: 'Don't start. _Briseus_ appointed to East Coast Africa, slaver catching.' A telegram that had come three days too late! A telegram that was re-forwarded to Capetown, where it lay for forty-seven days awaiting the arrival of the _Emperor of the Moon_, and, then,--was forgotten! CHAPTER VII 'AN OCEAN WAIF'