e task of going out to
gather honey."

"A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex
civilization--"

"Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the
primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who,
when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."

"And so you've come back to Boston to work?"

"To work--or something."

"You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of--something."

"Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long
now that I'm willing to make it anything."

"Make what--anything?"

"My excuse for remaining on earth. If I'm to go on doing that, I've got
to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my
hotel bill."

"You're luckier than you know to be able to do that much," Guion said,
with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position. "But you've been
uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven't you? Made some money out of that mine
business, didn't you? Or was it in sugar?"

Davenant laughed. "A little," he admitted. "But, to any one like you,
sir, it would seem a trifle."

"To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and
spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a
million dollars I'd sell my soul."

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly,
while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.

"That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure
and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and
problematical."

Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor
warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in
the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the
commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it
was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret
self. He had been in this position more than once before--when men
wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know--when, whipped by
conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried
to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the
desperate suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally
men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine
streak in it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve--his
rather cowardly reserve, he called it--he was always