s cutty which he stowed away.

The great heart ache and the greater disillusion would not have fallen
to his lot had Elsa been frank in Rangoon, had she but told him that
she was to sail on the same steamer. He would have put over his
sailing. He would have gone his way, still believing himself to be a
Bayard, a Galahad, or any other of those simple dreamers who put honor
and chivalry above and before all other things.

Elsa! He covered his face with his hands and remained in that position
for a long while, so long indeed that the coolies, whose business it
was to scrub the tilings every morning at four, went about their work
quietly for fear of disturbing him.

Elsa had retired almost immediately after dinner. She endeavored to
finish some initial-work on old embroideries, but the needle insisted
upon pausing and losing stitch after stitch. She went to bed and tried
to concentrate her thoughts upon a story, but she could no more follow
a sentence to the end than she could fly. Then she strove to sleep,
but that sweet healer came not to her wooing. Nothing she did could
overcome the realization of the shock she had received. It had left
her dull and bewildered.

The name echoed and reechoed through her mind: Paul Ellison. It should
have been an illumination; instead, she had been thrust into utter
darkness. Neither Arthur nor his mother had ever spoken of a brother,
and she had known them for nearly ten years. Two men, who might be
twin-brothers, with the same name: it was maddening. What could it
mean? The beautiful white-haired mother, the handsome charming son,
who idolized each other; and this adventurer, this outcast, this
patient, brave and kindly outcast, with his funny parrakeet, what was
he to them and they to him? It must be, it must be! They _were_
brothers. Nature, full of amazing freaks as she was, had not
perpetrated this one without calling upon a single strain of blood.

She lay back among her pillows, her eyes leveled at the few stars
beyond her door, opened to admit any cooling breeze. Her head ached.
It was like the computations of astronomers; to a certain extent the
human mind could grasp the distances but could not comprehend them. It
was more than chance. Chance alone had not brought him to the
crumbling ledge. There was a strain of fatalism in Elsa. She was
positive that all these things had been written long before and that
she was to be used as the key.

Paul Ellison