ed
entirely for excitement, as other men live to drink until they kill
themselves by it; nothing he had done had counted for much except his
bridges. They are still standing. But the things he had written are
lost in the columns of the daily papers. The soldiers he had fought
with knew him only as a man who cared more for the fighting than for
what the fighting was about, and he had been as ready to write on one
side as to fight on the other. He was a rolling stone, and had been a
rolling stone from the time he was sixteen and had run away to sea, up
to the day he had met this girl, when he was just thirty. Yet you can
see how such a man would attract a young, impressionable girl, who had
met only those men whose actions are bounded by the courts of law or
Wall Street, or the younger set who drive coaches and who live the
life of the clubs. She had gone through life as some people go through
picture-galleries, with their catalogues marked at the best pictures.
She knew nothing of the little fellows whose work was skied, who were
trying to be known, who were not of her world, but who toiled and
prayed and hoped to be famous. This man came into her life suddenly
with his stories of adventure and strange people and strange places,
of things done for the love of doing them and not for the reward or
reputation, and he bewildered her at first, I suppose, and then
fascinated, and then won her. You can imagine how it was, these two
walking the deck together during the day, or sitting side by side when
the night came on, the ocean stretched before them. The daring of his
present undertaking, the absurd glamour that is thrown over those who
have gone into that strange country from which some travellers
return, and the picturesqueness of his past life. It is no wonder the
girl made too much of him. I do not think he knew what was coming. He
did not pose before her. I am quite sure, from what I knew of him,
that he did not. Indeed, I believed him when he said that he had
fought against the more than interest she had begun to show for him.
He was the sort of man women care for, but they had not been of this
woman's class or calibre. It came to him like a sign from the heavens.
It was as if a goddess had stooped to him. He told her when they
separated that if he succeeded--if he opened this unknown country, if
he was rewarded as they had promised to reward him--he might dare to
come to her; and she called him her knight-errant, and ga