nts me so. It is the fact of
having lost the power over myself."

"I--don't think I quite understand."

"I mean, it is the fact of having come to the end of my courage, to the
point where I found myself a coward."

"Surely there is a limit to what anyone can bear."

"Yes; and the man who has once reached that limit never knows when he
may reach it again."

"Would you mind telling me," she asked, hesitating, "how you came to be
stranded out there alone at twenty?"

"Very simply: I had a good opening in life, at home in the old country,
and ran away from it."

"Why?"

He laughed again in his quick, harsh way.

"Why? Because I was a priggish young cub, I suppose. I had been brought
up in an over-luxurious home, and coddled and faddled after till I
thought the world was made of pink cotton-wool and sugared almonds. Then
one fine day I found out that someone I had trusted had deceived me.
Why, how you start! What is it?"

"Nothing. Go on, please."

"I found out that I had been tricked into believing a lie; a common bit
of experience, of course; but, as I tell you, I was young and priggish,
and thought that liars go to hell. So I ran away from home and plunged
into South America to sink or swim as I could, without a cent in my
pocket or a word of Spanish in my tongue, or anything but white hands
and expensive habits to get my bread with. And the natural result was
that I got a dip into the real hell to cure me of imagining sham ones.
A pretty thorough dip, too--it was just five years before the Duprez
expedition came along and pulled me out."

"Five years! Oh, that is terrible! And had you no friends?"

"Friends! I"--he turned on her with sudden fierceness--"I have NEVER had
a friend!"

The next instant he seemed a little ashamed of his vehemence, and went
on quickly:

"You mustn't take all this too seriously; I dare say I made the worst
of things, and really it wasn't so bad the first year and a half; I was
young and strong and I managed to scramble along fairly well till the
Lascar put his mark on me. But after that I couldn't get work. It's
wonderful what an effectual tool a poker is if you handle it properly;
and nobody cares to employ a cripple."

"What sort of work did you do?"

"What I could get. For some time I lived by odd-jobbing for the blacks
on the sugar plantations, fetching and carrying and so on. It's one of
the curious things in life, by the way, that slaves always contrive to
have a s