next sailing, to make
continued love to Vanessa, and never to go to Tawnleytown again.
There was little probability that Janet would come here for him. Ten
years and ten thousand miles ... despite all that he had vowed on
Bald Knob that Sunday so long ago, wouldn't you have said that was
barrier enough?

Why, so should I! But it wasn't.

For Harber took the letter and put it in a fresh envelope, and in
the morning he went aboard the steamer without seeing the girl again ...
unless that bit of white standing near the top of the slope, as the
ship churned the green harbour water heading out to sea, were she,
waving.

But he kept the address she had written.

Why? He never could use it. Well, perhaps he didn't want to forget
too soon, though it hurt him to remember. How many of us, after all,
have some little memory like that, some intimate communion with
romance, which we don't tell, but cling to? And perhaps the memory
is better than the reality would have been. We imagine ... but that
again is cynical. Harber will never be that now. Let me tell you why.

It's because he hadn't been aboard ship on his crossing to Victoria
twenty-four hours before he met Clay Barton.

Barton was rolled up in rugs, lying in a deck-chair, biting his
teeth hard together to keep them from chattering, though the
temperature was in the eighties, and most of the passengers in white.
Barton appeared to be a man of forty, whereas he turned out to be in
his early twenties. He was emaciated to an alarming degree and his
complexion was of the pale, yellow-green that spoke of many
recurrences of malaria. The signs were familiar to Harber.

He sat down beside Barton, and, as the other looked at him half a
dozen times tentatively, he presently spoke to him.

"You've had a bad time of it, haven't you?"

"Terrible," said Barton frankly. "They say I'm convalescent now. I
don't know. Look at me. What would you say?"

Harber shook his head.

Barton laughed bitterly. "Yes, I'm pretty bad," he agreed readily.
And then, as he talked that day and the two following, he told
Harber a good many things.

"I tell you, Harber," he said, "we'll do anything for money. Here I
am--and I knew damned well it was killing me, too. And yet I stuck
it out six months after I'd any earthly business to--just for a few
extra hundreds."

"Where were you? What were you doing?" asked Harber.

"Trading-post up a river in the Straits Settlements," said Barton.
"A cra