, he might have been
successful had it not been for the intrusive recollection of a moment,
years before, when a girl whom he knew to be proud without suspecting
how proud she was had in answer to the first passionate words he ever
uttered started to her feet, and, fanning herself languidly, walked
away. The memory of that instant froze on his tongue words that might
have made him happy, sending him back into his solitary ways. They were
ways, as he saw plainly enough, that led no whither; for which reason he
had endeavored, as soon as he was financially justified, to get out of
them by taking a long holiday and traveling round the world.

He was approaching the end of his second journey when the realization
came to him that as far as his great object was concerned the
undertaking had been a failure. He was as much outside the broader
current of human sympathies as ever. Then, all at once, he began to see
the reason why.

The first promptings to this discovery came to him one spring evening as
he stood on the deck of the steam-launch he had hired at Shanghai to go
up and down the Yangste-Kiang. Born in China, the son of a medical
missionary, he had taken a notion to visit his birthplace at Hankow. It
was a pilgrimage he had shirked on his first trip to that country, a
neglect for which he afterward reproached himself. All things
considered, to make it was as little as he could do in memory of the
brave man and woman to whom he owed his existence.

Before this visit it must be admitted, Rufus and Corinna Hallett, his
parents according to the flesh, had been as remote and mythical to the
mind of Peter Davenant as the Dragon's Teeth to their progeny, the
Spartans. Merely in the most commonplace kind of data he was but poorly
supplied concerning them. He knew his father had once been a zealous
young doctor in Graylands, Illinois, and had later become one of the
pioneers of medical enterprise in the mission field; he knew, too, that
he had already worked for some years at Hankow before he met and married
Miss Corinna Meecham, formerly of Drayton, Georgia, but at that time a
teacher in a Chinese school supported by one of the great American
churches. Events after that seemed to have followed rapidly. Within a
few years the babe who was to become Peter Davenant had seen the light,
the mother had died, and the father had perished as the victim of a
rising in the interior of Hupeh. The child, being taken to America, and
uncla