turn back. Of his return journey he said
nothing; Granger learnt that from his mother in later years. It had
been made in agonies of hunger and thirst, which had nearly robbed him
of his life. Nevertheless, his father had told him that, so soon as he
got well again, he was going back, and that he would reach El Dorado
this time. True to his word, when his fever had left him, he had bade
them all good-bye, making his son secretly promise that, if he should
not come back, when he became a man, he would follow him in the quest.
Then had come the two years of anxious waiting in which they had had
no news of him, and the final acceptance of the belief that he was
dead. But his grandfather would not lose faith; he himself had once
been missing for five years. He said that his son had reached the
city, and was pushing homeward through the Andes on to the Pacific
side. Night by night, in that back room with the bow-window, he had
collected his records and studied them beneath the lamp. "He must be
about here by now," he would say, pointing to a certain place. But the
boy's mother had only smiled sadly, saying, "Is he not yet
undeceived?" Then one evening they had left him in his chair, and had
not heard him come up to bed, and in the morning had found him sitting
stiff and silent in the sunshine, with the map of Guiana spread out
before him and his finger on the spot where he had written EL DORADO,
the magic word.

The child had never forgotten that sight, its impression had sunk deep
into his nature; somehow it had become symbolic for him of loyalty to
one's chosen purpose in life. As he had once asked permission to kiss
his father's hands, so, when there was no one in the room to watch
him, he had stolen up and smoothed his hands with reverence against
the cushions of the chair where the old grey head had last rested--but
he had never sat there. After the old man's death, all things in that
room became objects for his veneration. It was just this capacity in
the small boy for hero-worship which his mother never tried to
understand; so he kept his secret, and thus began the breach which was
presently to widen. From that day Granger had pledged himself, when he
should become a man, to go in search of his father and to inherit his
quest; and to such a nature as Granger's that childish pledge was
binding. He could never be persuaded that his father was dead; he
always spoke and thought of him as a soldierly fair-haired man, livin