don't often--I like to creep away and lie low. I like to take it
alone."

"Well, I'm built rather that way myself, Hazon. I won't apologize for
intruding, because you know as well as I do that no such consideration
enters into the matter. Still, I want you to know that if there's
anything I can do for you, you have only to say so."

"Thanks. You are not quite like--other people, Stanninghame. Life is no
great thing, is it, that everybody should stir up such a mighty fuss
about clearing out of it?"

"No, it's no great thing," assented Laurence darkly. "Yet it might be
made so."

"How that?"

"With wealth. With wealth you can do anything--command anything--buy
anything. They say that wealth won't purchase life, but very often it
will."

"You're about three parts right. It will, for instance, enable a man to
lead the life he needs in order to preserve his physical and mental
vigour at its highest. Even from the moralist's point of view it is all
round desirable, for nothing is so morally deteriorating as a life of
narrow and cramped pinching, when all one's best years are spent in
hungering and longing for what one will never again attain."

"You speak like a book, Hazon," said Laurence, not wondering that the
other should have sized up his own case so exhaustively--not wondering,
because he was an observer of human nature and a character-reader
himself. Then, bitterly, "Yet that pumpkin-pated entity, the ponderous
moralist, would contend that the lack of all that made life worth living
was good as a stimulus to urge to exertion, and all the hollow old
clap-trap."

"Quite so. But how many attain to the reward--the end of the said
exertion? Not one in a hundred. And then, in nine cases out of ten, how
does that one do it? By fraud, and thieving, and over-reaching, and
sycophancy--in short, by running through the whole gamut of the scale of
rascality--rascality of the meaner kind, mark you. Then when this winner
in the battle of life comes out top, the world crowns him with fat and
fulsome eulogy, and falls down and worships his cheque-book, crying,
'Behold a self-made man; go thou and do likewise!'"

"You've not merely hit the right nail on the head, Hazon, but you've
driven it right home," said Laurence decisively, recognizing that here
was a man after his own heart.

Two or three days went by before Hazon felt able or inclined to leave
his bed, and a good part of each was spent by Laurence sitting in the
s