ry wrung out by pain.

'He was silent again with a still, far-away look of fierce yearning
after that missed distinction, with his nostrils for an instant dilated,
sniffing the intoxicating breath of that wasted opportunity. If you
think I was either surprised or shocked you do me an injustice in more
ways than one! Ah, he was an imaginative beggar! He would give himself
away; he would give himself up. I could see in his glance darted into
the night all his inner being carried on, projected headlong into the
fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations. He had no leisure to
regret what he had lost, he was so wholly and naturally concerned for
what he had failed to obtain. He was very far away from me who watched
him across three feet of space. With every instant he was penetrating
deeper into the impossible world of romantic achievements. He got to
the heart of it at last! A strange look of beatitude overspread his
features, his eyes sparkled in the light of the candle burning between
us; he positively smiled! He had penetrated to the very heart--to
the very heart. It was an ecstatic smile that your faces--or mine
either--will never wear, my dear boys. I whisked him back by saying, "If
you had stuck to the ship, you mean!"

'He turned upon me, his eyes suddenly amazed and full of pain, with a
bewildered, startled, suffering face, as though he had tumbled down
from a star. Neither you nor I will ever look like this on any man. He
shuddered profoundly, as if a cold finger-tip had touched his heart.
Last of all he sighed.

'I was not in a merciful mood. He provoked one by his contradictory
indiscretions. "It is unfortunate you didn't know beforehand!" I
said with every unkind intention; but the perfidious shaft fell
harmless--dropped at his feet like a spent arrow, as it were, and he did
not think of picking it up. Perhaps he had not even seen it. Presently,
lolling at ease, he said, "Dash it all! I tell you it bulged. I was
holding up my lamp along the angle-iron in the lower deck when a
flake of rust as big as the palm of my hand fell off the plate, all of
itself." He passed his hand over his forehead. "The thing stirred and
jumped off like something alive while I was looking at it." "That made
you feel pretty bad," I observed casually. "Do you suppose," he said,
"that I was thinking of myself, with a hundred and sixty people at my
back, all fast asleep in that fore-'tween-deck alone--and more of them
aft; more on