letely ungenerous. Also
the bald skin upon his skull was drawn extremely tight, while the
flesh dropped in folds about his neck and under his lean chaps, and
the longer I pondered this the more distasteful I found him.

"You forget, Sir," said he--and while Martin translated he still
seemed to chew the words--"the story is not known to you only. I can
yet seek out the pilot himself."

"Morales? He is dead these three years."

"Your friends, then, upon the greater island. Failing them, I can yet
put back to Lagos and appeal to the Infante himself--for doubtless he
knows. Time is nothing to me now." He sat his chin obstinately, and
then, not without nobility, pushed his glass from him and stood up.
"Sir," said he, "I began by asking if you were a happy man. I am a
most unhappy one, and (I will confess) the unhappier since you have
made it clear that you cannot or will not understand me. In my youth
a great wrong was done me. You know my name, and you guess what
that wrong was: but you ask yourself, 'Is it possible this old man
remembers, after sixty years?' Sir, it is possible, nay, certain;
because I have never for an hour forgotten. You tell yourself, 'It
cannot be this only: there must be something behind.' There is nothing
behind; nothing. I am the Thomas d'Arfet whose wife betrayed him just
sixty years ago; that, and no more. I come on no State errand, I!
I have no son, no daughter; I never, to my knowledge, possessed a
friend. I trusted a woman, and she poisoned the world for me. I
acknowledge in return a duty to no man but myself; I have voyaged thus
far out of that duty. You, Sir, have thought it fitter to baffle than
to aid me--well and good. But by the Christ above us I will follow
that duty out; and, at the worst, death, when it comes, shall find me
pursuing it!"

He spoke this with a passion of voice which I admired before his
man began to interpret: and even when I heard it repeated in level
Portuguese, and had time to digest it and extract its monstrous
selfishness, I could look at him with compassion, almost with respect.
His cheeks had lost their flush almost as rapidly as they had taken it
on, and he stood awkwardly pulling at his long bony fingers until the
joints cracked.

"Be seated, Sir," said I. "It is clear to me that I must be a far
happier man than I considered myself only this morning, since I find
nothing in myself which, under any usage of God, could drive me on
such a pursuit as yours w