Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/34

 their loss as regrettable but inevitable. Yet here was Jane, when the fire had cooled, fanning to new life the flames of longing for the lost ship and the lost fortunes.

Indeed, no wonder the old family saying came to be! Nothing was quite the same after the Fortune of the Indies and her master vanished in the grip of the typhoon. Great-grandfather Mark in his will left the Gloria to his son; to his wife the mansion and a group of investments already tottering as the Eastern trade slackened. The surviving Ingrams began to readjust themselves. The younger Mark sailed the Gloria for some years more, but the fine old ships were being steadily elbowed off the seas by swift and scornful steam-vessels. The Gloria was very old and Grandfather Mark had no money for further ventures; slowly she broke up at Ingram Wharf, only faintly reproachful in her resignation. And Jane's father came no more nearly in touch with the sea than a clerkship in a Boston mercantile house.

It is a long foreword, and dull perhaps, but the shadows of it all clung so closely in the little office of the Ingram house that Jane felt it