orated with references to flowers turned to dust,
setting suns that would never rise again, countless symbols of hopeless
passion and impending tragedy.

But, as an anti-climax, he always showed up alive in vacation time.

During his college years he had apparently forgotten her, had made
himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried
the Byronic gesture. Then, after Commencement, meeting her
unexpectedly, he had turned a yellowish white.

Now Cornelius Rysbroek had become a lean, neat hypochondriac, highly
cultivated, with fine instincts and excruciating aversions, bored by
his leisure, yet incapable of action, and inconstant in every
aspiration except this love of his. Whenever she refused him he sailed
away, after threatening to plunge into some wild, dramatic waste, but
always compromising on the easiest, beaten path. He returned sadder
and sallower than ever, having contracted in his imagination some new,
obscure ailment, and with his old ailment, his longing for Lilla, still
gnawing at his heart.

But Lilla, so fragile and moody, dreamed of physical strength and a
triumphant will.

Where was he?

She was enervated by melancholy, scorched by impatience, then chilled
by an indefinable foreboding, just as her father had been. Putting on
a figured veil to blur her blush of shame, she slipped away to visit
the soothsayers that fashionable women patronized. In a shadowy room
hung with Oriental curtains, the shrewd crystal gazer informed her that
all would soon be well. "A great love was in store for her."

She kept in her desk a magazine picture of Lawrence Teck, the explorer,
whom she had never met, but whose likeness, singular amid innumerable
presentments of the human face, had arrested her first glance and
fascinated her mind.

His aquiline countenance, darkened and corrugated by fierce suns,
expressed that virility which kept driving him back, for his
contentment, into remote and dangerous places. But his salient
features suggested also the patience and wisdom of those who have
suffered hardship and derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude. It
pleased her to note that his was the brow of a scholar--he had written
learned volumes about the jungle peoples, was the most picturesque
authority on the Islamic world since Burton, and his monographs on
African diseases had added to his romantic reputation the luster of
benevolence. She liked to picture him as finding in his tr