him, and he found me sympathetic, I suppose, or else he did not care, and only wanted to speak of her to some one, and so he told me the story over and over again as I walked beside the litter, or as we sat by the fire at night.  She must have been a very remarkable girl.  He had met her first the year before, on one of the Italian steamers that ply from New York to Gibraltar.  She was travelling with her father, who was an invalid going to Tangier for his health; from Tangier they were to go on up to Nice and Cannes, and in the spring to Paris and on to London for this season just over.  The man was going from Gibraltar to Zanzibar, and then on into the Congo.  They had met the first night out; they had separated thirteen days later at Gibraltar, and in that time the girl had fallen in love with him, and had promised to marry him if he would let her, for he was very proud.  He had to be.  He had absolutely nothing to offer her.  She is very well known at home.  I mean her family is:  they have lived in New York from its first days, and they are very rich.  The girl had lived a life as different from his as the life of a girl in society must be from that of a vagabond.  He had been an engineer, a newspaper correspondent, an officer in a Chinese army, and had built bridges in South America, and led their little revolutions there, and had seen service on the desert in the French army of Algiers.  He had no home or nationality even, for he had left America when he was sixteen; he had no family, had saved no money, and was trusting everything to the success of this expedition into Africa to make him known and to give him position.  It was the story of Othello and Desdemona over again.  His blackness lay from her point of view, or rather would have lain from the point of view of her friends, in the fact that he was as helplessly ineligible a young man as a cowboy.  And he really had lived a life of which he had no great reason to be proud.  He had existed entirely for excitement, as other men live to drink until they kill themselves by it; nothing he had done had counted for much except his bridges.  They are still standing.  But the things he had written are lost in the columns of the daily papers.  The soldiers he had fought with knew him only as a man who cared more for the fighting than for what the fighting was about, and he had been as ready to write on one side as to fight on the other.  He was a rolling stone, and had been a rolling stone from the time he was sixteen and had run away to sea, up to the day he had met this girl, when he was just thirty.  Yet you can see how such a man would attract a young, impressionable girl, who had met only those men whose actions are bounded by the courts of law or Wall Street, or the younger set who drive coaches and who live the life of the clubs.  She had gone through life as some people go through picture-galleries, with their catalogues marked at the best pictures.  She knew nothing of the little fellows whose work was skied, who were