and here last night after three years.
I just break my journey on the way to London, and I run against the
little girl that broke my heart when I was fifteen years of age, and
broke it again when I was one-and-twenty, and would just go on breaking
it for the mere fun of the thing for the next million years, if she and
me could only live as long.'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Paul, in a cold insolence which made him
hot to think of a thousand times later, 'have you been drinking?'

'Well, I guess,' said Mr. Brunton, and, leaning back in his deck-chair,
drew a great volume of smoke into his lungs, expelled it in a cloud, and
laughed; 'after a three years' drought, the man who is not game to
drink deserves to go dry. But, by Heaven, sir, to strike up against that
mighty little flirt after a space of fifteen years--to come across it
all again by accident! Look here! I land out of the _Grande Marie de
Luxembourg_ at Naples, with no more idea of revivin' old times than of
escapin' into the next century, and who's the first person that I
meet but little Gertie, and what's the first word that I hear but the
isolation of the soul!'

Paul sat in a chill, tense agony.

'I was,' said the Colonel, growing more and more clearly articulate in
accordance with his needs, 'about as full up as any Christian need be
when I landed, and I was going to bed like a clean Christian gentleman.
Then I ran up against Gertie. I have been Turkish bathed, I have been
sluiced and washed and shaved and perfumed, and I can stand and talk
straight. What do you say? What would you have said about me amongst
the oranges and lemons in the garden there?' He sat up in a momentary
fierceness. 'Am I intoxicated, or, at least, was I till I turned
the lock-gate winch and set the waters foaming? No, sir, but in that
profoundly philosophic observation of life your works declare you will
have observed the state in which a man becomes drunk-sober.

He brims over after that stage. That I allow. He brims over, sir--he
brims over, sir. If it is of any humorous value to you to make
observations of the present case, _I_ am brimming over, sir.'

The clean-cut, travel-hardened, sun-stained man was slipping from his
original place in Paul's mind, like a statue built in clay too soft to
support its own weight. He slipped at the chin, at the mouth, at
the base of the nostril, at the eyebrow, and yet, in spite of these
deflections from the original, he appeared to recov