But he kept the address she had written.

Why?  He never could use it.  Well, perhaps he didn’t want to forget too soon, though it hurt him to remember.  How many of us, after all, have some little memory like that, some intimate communion with romance, which we don’t tell, but cling to?  And perhaps the memory is better than the reality would have been.  We imagine ... but that again is cynical.  Harber will never be that now.  Let me tell you why.

It’s because he hadn’t been aboard ship on his crossing to Victoria twenty-four hours before he met Clay Barton.

Barton was rolled up in rugs, lying in a deck-chair, biting his teeth hard together to keep them from chattering, though the temperature was in the eighties, and most of the passengers in white.  Barton appeared to be a man of forty, whereas he turned out to be in his early twenties.  He was emaciated to an alarming degree and his complexion was of the pale, yellow-green that spoke of many recurrences of malaria.  The signs were familiar to Harber.

He sat down beside Barton, and, as the other looked at him half a dozen times tentatively, he presently spoke to him.

“You’ve had a bad time of it, haven’t you?”

“Terrible,” said Barton frankly.  “They say I’m convalescent now.  I don’t know.  Look at me.  What would you say?”

Harber shook his head.

Barton laughed bitterly.  “Yes, I’m pretty bad,” he agreed readily.  And then, as he talked that day and the two following, he told Harber a good many things.

“I tell you, Harber,” he said, “we’ll do anything for money.  Here I am—­and I knew damned well it was killing me, too.  And yet I stuck it out six months after I’d any earthly business to—­just for a few extra hundreds.”

“Where were you?  What were you doing?” asked Harber.

“Trading-post up a river in the Straits Settlements,” said Barton.  “A crazy business from the beginning—­and yet I made money.  Made it lots faster than I could have back home.  Back there you’re hedged about with too many rules.  And competition’s too keen.  You go into some big corporation office at seventy-five a month, maybe, and unless you have luck you’re years getting near anything worth having.  And you’ve got to play politics, bootlick your boss—­all that.  So I got out.

“Went to California first, and got a place in an exporting firm in San Francisco.  They sent me to Sydney and then to Fiji.  After I’d been out for a while and got the hang of things, I cut loose from them.

“Then I got this last chance, and it looked mighty good—­and I expect I’ve done for myself by it.  Five years or a little better.  That’s how long I’ve lasted.  Back home I’d have been good for thirty-five.  A short life and a merry one, they say.  Merry.  Good God!”

He shook his head ironically.

“The root of all evil,” he resumed after a little.  “Well, but you’ve got to have it—­can’t get along without it in this world.  You’ve done well, you say?”