and voiced itself. "Why are you here?"
she said. "Why does a man like you stay here?"

His elbow rested on the arm of his chair, his chin in his hand, his gaze
too upon the fading embers. "I don't know," he said in a low voice, "I
had to come."

"Where from?" she still followed her instinct of curiosity.

"From the husks"--he turned his head and smiled at her--"from a far
country where I had wasted my substance in riotous living."

She frowned a little. She was not used to this type of man, nor had she
met any one who used hyperbole in conversation. At first she fancied
that he might be chaffing her, but she was too intelligent to harbor
that idea, so convincing was his innate sincerity; but nevertheless, she
meant to go cautiously.

Again she questioned him: "From what far country?"

He had fallen to musing again, and it is doubtful if he heard her. He
saw before him immense, primeval forests, black, shadowy; vast, sluggish
rivers, above which hung a thick and fever-laden air; trees from whose
topmost branches swung gorgeous, ephemeral flowers; and then long
stretches of yellow beach, where a brazen ocean tumbled and hissed. Then
many cities, squalid and splendid, colorful and fantastic as the
erection of a dream, and through all these he saw himself ever passing,
appearing and reappearing, and ever scattering his substance, not the
substance of money alone; that was still left him; but the substance of
youth, of early promise, of illusion and hopes.

Pearl waited a long time, it seemed to her, for him to speak. At last
she broke the silence. "And then?" she said.

He roused from his preoccupations and brushed back the wing of hair from
his brow. "I realized that I was living, had always lived on husks, and
that was what caused the restless fever in my blood, my heart was
always restless; and then I began to dream down there in the tropics,
really dream at night of these mountains just as you see them here, and
in the day time I thought of them and longed for them, as a man whose
throat is dry with thirst longs for cool water. Then, presently, I began
to have brief, fleeting visions of them by day. And gradually the
longing for the hills became so intense that I started out in search of
them. I traveled about a good bit, and then drifted here. The place
suited me, so I stayed."

She looked at him puzzled and half-fearfully, wondering if he was quite
sane. "And will you stay here always?" she asked.

"Oh, a