and pompous, was gone.

He looked at me with a faint smile of embarrassment. "And what an
ungrateful brute I was!" he exclaimed. "David, did you remember the
promises I made that day?"

"I used to remember them," I answered, "and to wonder."

"You had the right," he said. "But remember what I was--just a lonely
grub. Till Penelope came to me I had nothing but the mills. Having
her, I wanted her entirely." He held out his hand. "She was only that
high, David, and I was getting gray. I never looked at her but there
came into my mind another just that high who had a desk in school in
front of mine, and sometimes I seemed to be looking again over the top
of my spelling-book at the same bright hair and the same bobbing bit of
ribbon. Can't you see what she meant to me, David? She hated me at
first--she spoke always of her father and of you--and I was jealous."

"I understand," said I.

He had not spoken of the letters. There was no need of it. I knew
that they were in his mind and that he was perfectly conscious of the
pettiness of his action. But for me his simple confession had absolved
him.

"I wanted her entirely," he went on, throwing himself into a chair at
my side. "I wanted something to live for beside the mills. In
Penelope I found it. What the mills gave me was for her. Every hour I
worked was happier because it was for her good. Sometimes I have to
fight against a dread that Hendry will come back and take her from me,
and yet when I think of him, tumbling around the world alone, I want
him too--want him in that very chair you are sitting in. It would be
so good just to hear him talk, and it wouldn't make any difference to
us now if he did just talk." Rufus Blight brought a fist down on the
arm of his chair. "David, I must find him!"

"He went to Tibet," said I.

"To the South Seas, to the Arctic, to Tibet--everywhere, David. His
trail has led me all over the world. I can never catch up to him. The
Philadelphia man you told me of--Harassan--dead three years. My
secretary, Mallencroft, has found that in San Francisco a man named
Henderson worked on _The Press_ there, but only two men remembered him.
They said he was erratic, always in trouble by writing things contrary
to the paper's policy, and gave up in disgust, to ship as supercargo on
a vessel trading in the South Seas. He wrote a book after that, but
the publishers failed, and Mallencroft couldn't even find a copy of it.
Th