edonia_ hogged it, the _Ghost_ has lost about
fifteen hundred dollars' worth of skins."

"You speak so calmly--" she began.

"But I do not feel calm; I could kill the man who robbed me," he
interrupted. "Yes, yes, I know, and that man my brother--more sentiment!
Bah!"

His face underwent a sudden change. His voice was less harsh and wholly
sincere as he said:

"You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy at
dreaming and finding things good, and, because you find some of them
good, feeling good yourself. Now, tell me, you two, do you find me
good?"

"You are good to look upon--in a way," I qualified.

"There are in you all powers for good," was Maud Brewster's answer.

"There you are!" he cried at her, half angrily. "Your words are empty to
me. There is nothing clear and sharp and definite about the thought you
have expressed. You cannot pick it up in your two hands and look at it.
In point of fact, it is not a thought. It is a feeling, a sentiment, a
something based upon illusion and not a product of the intellect at all."

As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into
it. "Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were
blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions.
They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the
face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and
live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage
for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at
living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most
lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to
you and more gratifying than are my facts to me."

He shook his head slowly, pondering.

"I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must
be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling
and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your
moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight
is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I
envy you, I envy you."

He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange
quizzical smiles, as he added:

"It's from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My
reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a
sober man looking upon d