In one of Seaton's visits to the _Proserpine_ he detected the mate and the captain talking together and looking at him with unfriendly eyes--scowling at him would hardly be too strong a word.
However, he was in no state of mind to care much how two animals in blue jackets received his acts of self-martyrdom. He was there to do the last kind offices of despairing love for the angel that had crossed his dark path and illumined it for a moment, to leave it now forever.
At last the fatal evening came; her last in Sydney.
Then Seaton's fortitude, sustained no longer by the feverish stimulus of doing kindly acts for her, began to give way, and he desponded deeply.
At nine in the evening he crept upon General Rolleston's lawn, where he had first seen her. He sat down in sullen despair upon the very spot.
Then he came nearer the house. There was a lamp in the dining-room; he looked in and saw her.
She was seated at her father's knee, looking up at him fondly; her hand was in his; the tears were in their eyes; she had no mother; he no son; they loved one another devotedly. This, their tender gesture, and their sad silence, spoke volumes to any one that had known sorrow. Poor Seaton sat down on the dewy grass outside and wept because she was weeping.
Her father sent her to bed early. Seaton watched, as he had often done before, till her light went out; and then he flung himself on the wet grass and stared at the sky in utter misery.
The mind is often clearest in the middle of the night; and all of a sudden he saw, as if written on the sky, that she was going to England expressly to marry Arthur Wardlaw.
At this revelation he started up, stung with hate as well as love, and his tortured mind rebelled furiously. He repeated his vow that this should never be; and soon a scheme came into his head to prevent it; but it was a project so wild and dangerous that, even as his heated brain hatched it, his cooler judgment said, "Fly, madman, fly! or this love will _destroy_ you!"
He listened to the voice of reason, and in another minute he was out of the premises. He fluttered to his lodgings.
When he got there he could not go in; he turned and fluttered about the streets, not knowing or caring whither; his mind was in a whirl; and, what with his bodily fever and his boiling heart, passion began to overpower reason, that had held out so gallantly till now. He found himself at the harbor, staring with wild and bloodshot eyes at the _Proserpine,_ he who, an hour ago, had seen that he had but one thing to do--to try and forget young Wardlaw's bride. He groaned aloud, and ran wildly back into the town. He hurried up and down one narrow street, raging inwardly, like some wild beast in its den.
By-and-by his mood changed, and he hung round a lamp-post and fell to moaning and lamenting his hard fate and hers.
A policeman came up, took him for a maudlin drunkard, and half-advised, half-admonished, him to go home.
At that he gave a sort of fierce, despairing snarl and ran into the next street to be alone.
