“. . . the leading man here some day. . . .  Like me.”

Renouard let the thin summer portiere of the doorway fall behind him.  The voice of Professor Moorsom said —

“I am told that he has made an enemy of almost every man who had to work with him.”

“That’s nothing.  He did his work. . . .  Like me.”

“He never counted the cost they say.  Not even of lives.”

Renouard understood that they were talking of him.  Before he could move away, Mrs. Dunster struck in placidly —

“Don’t let yourself be shocked by the tales you may hear of him, my dear.  Most of it is envy.”

Then he heard Miss Moorsom’s voice replying to the old lady —

“Oh!  I am not easily deceived.  I think I may say I have an instinct for truth.”

He hastened away from that house with his heart full of dread.

CHAPTER VI

On board the schooner, lying on the settee on his back with the knuckles of his hands pressed over his eyes, he made up his mind that he would not return to that house for dinner—­that he would never go back there any more.  He made up his mind some twenty times.  The knowledge that he had only to go up on the quarter deck, utter quietly the words:  “Man the windlass,” and that the schooner springing into life would run a hundred miles out to sea before sunrise, deceived his struggling will.  Nothing easier!  Yet, in the end, this young man, almost ill-famed for his ruthless daring, the inflexible leader of two tragically successful expeditions, shrank from that act of savage energy, and began, instead, to hunt for excuses.

No!  It was not for him to run away like an incurable who cuts his throat.  He finished dressing and looked at his own impassive face in the saloon mirror scornfully.  While being pulled on shore in the gig, he remembered suddenly the wild beauty of a waterfall seen when hardly more than a boy, years ago, in Menado.  There was a legend of a governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, on official tour, committing suicide on that spot by leaping into the chasm.  It was supposed that a painful disease had made him weary of life.  But was there ever a visitation like his own, at the same time binding one to life and so cruelly mortal!

The dinner was indeed quiet.  Willie, given half an hour’s grace, failed to turn up, and his chair remained vacant by the side of Miss Moorsom.  Renouard had the professor’s sister on his left, dressed in an expensive gown becoming her age.  That maiden lady in her wonderful preservation reminded Renouard somehow of a wax flower under glass.  There were no traces of the dust of life’s battles on her anywhere.  She did not like him very much in the afternoons, in his white drill suit and planter’s hat, which seemed to her an unduly Bohemian costume for calling in a house where there were ladies.  But in the evening, lithe and elegant