Her eyelids drooped; he stood now erect and motionless; in spite of the determination to maintain that matter-of-fact pose, visions appeared momentarily in his eyes.  The glamour of the instant he had referred to caught him.  All he had felt then at the unexpected sight of her—­beautiful, far-away—­returned to him.  She was near now, but still immeasurably distant.  He pulled himself together; he hadn’t explained very much yet.  He was forced to go on; her eyes once more seemed to draw the story from him.

“Yes; I had some purpose in going away like that.  The idea came to me at the sanatorium, when I was about ‘all in’.  They’d managed to keep the drugs and the drink from me, and one day I seemed to wake up and realize I hadn’t ever really lived.  Just been a tail-ender who had ’gone the pace’.  Hadn’t even had a beginning.  Was it too late to start over again?  Probably.”  His voice came in crisp accents.  “But it was a last chance—­a feeble one—­a straw to the drowning,” he laughed.  “That sounds absurd to you but I don’t know how to explain it better.”

“No; it doesn’t sound absurd,” she said.

“The idea of mine?—­how to carry it out?  Ways and means were not hard to find.  I went to”—­he mentioned a name—­“an old friend of my father’s.  He thought I was a fool,” bruskly, “but in the end he approved, or seemed to.  Anyhow, I persuaded him to take all my bonds, securities and the rest of (for me) cursed stuff.  At the end of a certain time, if I wanted back the few millions I hadn’t yet run through, he was to give them to me, minus commissions, wage, etc.”

“You mean,” said the girl, “that was the way you took to go back to the beginning, as you call it?” Her eyes were like stars.  “You practically gave away all your money so as to start by yourself.”

“How could I start with it?” he asked, with a faint smile.  “Don’t you see, Betty”—­in a momentary eagerness he forgot himself—­“there couldn’t be any compromising?  Besides, it came to me—­you will laugh”—­she did not laugh—­“that some day, somewhere else, if not here, I’d have to make that beginning, to be something myself.  Remember that old Hindu fellow with a red turban who sat on your front lawn, beneath the palms, and had the women gathered around him in a kind of hypnotic state?  He said something like that—­I thought him an old fakir at the time.  He used a lot of flowery language, but I guess, boiled down, it meant start at the bottom of the ladder.  Build yourself up, the way my father did,” with a certain wistful pride.  “You remember him?”

Her head moved.  “Fine looking, wasn’t he?” ruminatively.  “He got there with his hands and brains, and honestly.  While I hadn’t ever used either.  I hope,” he broke off, “all this doesn’t sound like preaching.”

“No,” she said.

An instant his gaze lingered on her.  “You’re sleepy now,” he spoke suddenly.

“No, I am not.  You found it a little hard, at first?”