odin, and
Marguerite Grey, tall and lovely in a tragic, flower-like way, who
painted, and played the 'cello.

"Meeting Bedient this time has been an experience to me," Cairns said,
toward the end of dinner. "I called together the very finest people I
knew, because of that. He had sailed for ten years before I knew him.
That was nearly thirteen years ago. Not that there's anything in miles,
nor sailing about from port to port.... He has ridden for the English
since, through the great Himalayan forests--years so strange that he
forgot their passing.... We are all good friends; in a sense, artists,
together, so I can say things. One wants to be pretty sure when one
lets go from the inside. I didn't realize before how rarely this
happens with us.

"The point is, Bedient has kept something through the years, that I
haven't. I'm getting away badly, but I trust what I mean will clear
up.... Bedient and I rode together with an American pack-train, when
there was fighting, there in Luzon. He was the cook of the outfit, and
he took me in, a cub-correspondent. I look back now upon some of those
talks (with the smell of coffee and forage and cigarettes in the night
air) as belonging to the few perfect things. And last night and the
night before, we talked again----"

Cairns' eye hurried past Mrs. Wordling, but he seemed to find what he
wanted in the glances of the others, before he resumed:

"Without knowing it, Bedient has made me see that I haven't been
keeping even decently white, here in New York. I found out, at the same
time, that I couldn't meet him half-way, when he brought the talk
close. Back yonder in Luzon, I used to. Here, after the years, I
couldn't. Something inside is green and untrained. It shied before real
man-talk.... Bedient came into a fortune recently, the result of saving
a captain during a long-ago typhoon. His property is down in Equatoria,
where he has been for some months. So he has had a windfall that would
be unmanning to most, yet he comes up here, just as unspoiled as he
used to be----"

"David," Bedient pleaded, "you're swinging around in a circle. Be easy
with me."

"You've kept your boy's heart, that's what I'm trying to get at,"
Cairns added briefly.

Kate Wilkes dropped her hand upon Bedient's arm, and said, "Don't
bother him. It looks to me as if truth were being born. You'd have to
be a city man or woman to understand how rare and relishable such an
event is."

"Thanks, Kate," said