er--and the
little house.... And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the
morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out
impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She
had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her
for that!... A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected
cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,--yet she
held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or
no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea--and this, through
those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick
and despicable with excess.

Bedient often questioned himself--why he had not given up his berth on
the _Truxton_ and remained longer in Adelaide. There were a dozen ships
in the harbor to take him forth when he cared. This thought had not
come to him at the time. Quite as remarkable was the formidable
_something_ which arose in his brain at the thought of going back. This
was not to be fathomed then--nor willed away. The roots of his
integrity were shaken at the thought of return. Andrew Bedient at
thirty-four understood. His was a soul that could thrive on dreams and
denials. Even half-formed, this soul was the source of a strange
antagonism, against which the fleshly desire to return was powerless.
Poise, indeed, for a cook among sailors and packers.

The time came when he heard other women--blessed women--speak of the
Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their
eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling
shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the
ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this--yet
preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the
South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair.
From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty
and dimension of a Helen.

Other experiences, up to the real romance--and these were surprisingly
few--were episodes, brief quickenings of the old flame...When the first
American soldiers were being lightered ashore in Manila harbor, in
fact, shortly after the cannonading in the harbor, a certain woman came
over from the States and took a house in Manila. It was known as the
Block-House. Some months afterward, and just before the long trip of
the Train in which Cairns featured, Bedient met this woman