ear that I have failed to make the most
of myself from you than from almost any one else."

"But, Mr. Clay," protested the girl, anxiously, "I think you have done
wonderfully well. I only said that I wanted you to do more. You are
so young and you have--"

Clay did not hear her. He was leaning forward looking moodily out
across the water, with his folded arms clasped across his knees.

"I have not made the most of myself," he repeated; "that is what you
said." He spoke the words as though she had delivered a sentence.
"You don't think well of what I have done, of what I am."

He drew in his breath and shook his head with a hopeless laugh, and
leaned back against the railing of the boat-house with the weariness in
his attitude of a man who has given up after a long struggle.

"No," he said with a bitter flippancy in his voice, "I don't amount to
much. But, my God!" he laughed, and turning his head away, "when you
think what I was! This doesn't seem much to you, and it doesn't seem
much to me now that I have your point of view on it, but when I
remember!" Clay stopped again and pressed his lips together and shook
his head. His half-closed eyes, that seemed to be looking back into
his past, lighted as they fell on King's white yacht, and he raised his
arm and pointed to it with a wave of the hand. "When I was sixteen I
was a sailor before the mast," he said, "the sort of sailor that King's
crew out there wouldn't recognize in the same profession. I was of so
little account that I've been knocked the length of the main deck at
the end of the mate's fist, and left to lie bleeding in the scuppers
for dead. I hadn't a thing to my name then but the clothes I wore, and
I've had to go aloft in a hurricane and cling to a swinging rope with
my bare toes and pull at a wet sheet until my finger-nails broke and
started in their sockets; and I've been a cowboy, with no companions
for six months of the year but eight thousand head of cattle and men as
dumb and untamed as the steers themselves. I've sat in my saddle night
after night, with nothing overhead but the stars, and no sound but the
noise of the steers breathing in their sleep. The women I knew were
Indian squaws, and the girls of the sailors' dance-houses and the
gambling-hells of Sioux City and Abilene, and Callao and Port Said.
That was what I was and those were my companions. Why!" he laughed,
rising and striding across the boat-house with his hands locked