CHAPTER 3.
The year was 1886.
When at business, Warburton sat in a high, bare room, which looked upon little Ailie Street, in Whitechapel; the air he breathed had a taste and odour strongly saccharine.

If his eye strayed to one of the walls, he saw a map of the West Indies; if to another, it fell upon a map of St.Kitts; if to the third, there was before him a plan of a sugar estate on that little island.

Here he sat for certain hours of the solid day, issuing orders to clerks, receiving commercial callers, studying trade journals in sundry languages--often reading some book which had no obvious reference to the sugar-refining industry.

It was not Will's ideal of life, but hither he had suffered himself to be led by circumstance, and his musings suggested no practicable issue into a more congenial world.
The death of his father when he was sixteen had left him with a certain liberty for shaping a career.

What he saw definitely before him was a small share in the St.Kitts property of Messrs.