'd failed. I never
guessed I should be faced with this. I'm so desperately sorry, Edward.
I'm so disappointed. I hoped you would do great things. It's almost more
than I can bear to think of you wasting your talents and your youth and
your chance in this lamentable way."

"Don't be grieved, old friend," said Edward. "I haven't failed. I've
succeeded. You can't think with what zest I look forward to life, how
full it seems to me and how significant. Sometimes, when you are married
to Isabel, you will think of me. I shall build myself a house on my
coral island and I shall live there, looking after my trees--getting the
fruit out of the nuts in the same old way that they have done for
unnumbered years--I shall grow all sorts of things in my garden, and I
shall fish. There will be enough work to keep me busy and not enough to
make me dull. I shall have my books and Eva, children, I hope, and above
all, the infinite variety of the sea and the sky, the freshness of the
dawn and the beauty of the sunset, and the rich magnificence of the
night. I shall make a garden out of what so short a while ago was a
wilderness. I shall have created something. The years will pass
insensibly, and when I am an old man I hope that I shall be able to look
back on a happy, simple, peaceful life. In my small way I too shall have
lived in beauty. Do you think it is so little to have enjoyed
contentment? We know that it will profit a man little if he gain the
whole world and lose his soul. I think I have won mine."

Edward led him to a room in which there were two beds and he threw
himself on one of them. In ten minutes Bateman knew by his regular
breathing, peaceful as a child's, that Edward was asleep. But for his
part he had no rest, he was disturbed in mind, and it was not till the
dawn crept into the room, ghostlike and silent, that he fell asleep.

Bateman finished telling Isabel his long story. He had hidden nothing
from her except what he thought would wound her or what made himself
ridiculous. He did not tell her that he had been forced to sit at dinner
with a wreath of flowers round his head and he did not tell her that
Edward was prepared to marry her uncle's half-caste daughter the moment
she set him free. But perhaps Isabel had keener intuitions than he knew,
for as he went on with his tale her eyes grew colder and her lips closed
upon one another more tightly. Now and then she looked at him closely,
and if he had been less intent o