“Six years ago I was in a small South American seaport acting as consul for Jack Trowbridge, who was down with yellow fever. One day when I was lazily killing time—and big flies—in the dusty, stuffy little consulate, Janet, whom I, of course, thought in England, and whom I had not seen for so long, came in. “She was a wreck. She had a boy of two or three years clinging to her skirts and a child in her arms. You may imagine, sir, my awful shock on seeing her thus. Her story was short. She had married a Cuban planter of very large fortune in Jamaica, and after two years of suspicion and dread and suffering she had learned that the scoundrel had deceived her, that he had a wife living in Cuba, and that, in consequence, she had no legal or other claim upon him. She was penniless. Hearing that I was cruising in those parts, she learned through the British consuls at different places just where I then was, and she turned to me. I made investigation and found the damnable story told her by her supposed husband only too true. His wife in Cuba was his only lawful wife—and Janet was a nameless and helpless victim of his lust and perfidy. I cabled for my yacht, which was being renovated at New York, and soon had Janet and her two children on their way to England. “I scarcely saw them during the long and bitterly sad voyage, but at night, as I stood at my trick at the wheel, and in the warm, dull days as I sat smoking in silence on deck, a thought grew and grew upon me. The little boat tossing about on the limitless waste of waters seemed to become the symbol of my aimless, drifting, worthless life. And then, one glorious tropical night, with the great stars burning sublimity and eternity into my heart, the blood of all my fathers seemed to rush hot and quick and insistent through all my being. I had it! I had at last found the Purpose, the Object, the Aim for which my life yearned, the Thing in waiting, for which all the common interests and passions of young men had failed to hold me, the One Thing, which, by absorbing my life, by becoming my way of defying and despising the world, would prove me my father’s son. “The next day I told Janet. We were standing alone looking out over the sea—and to both of us it seemed that the sea and life and eternity were alike trackless and tending nowhither. I told her, Sir Nelson, that she should not land in England the outcast, nameless victim of a blackguard’s infamy, but as my proclaimed wife. Her children would never know that they were fatherless. I had been away from home so long that I could get myself believed when I returned with a wife and family—and the world would never know that I was a wretched man cut off by a vow like a monk’s vow from the joys and the heart of life. That is all, Sir Nelson; that is all.”