Keith followed him to the billiard-room, a big apartment finished in oak, with several large tables in it, and he and Rhodes began to play.  The game, however, soon languished, for the two men had much to talk about.

“Houghton, you may go,” said Rhodes to the servant who attended to the table.  “I will ring for you when I want you to shut up.”

“Thank you, sir”; and he was gone.

“Now tell me all about everything,” said Rhodes.  “I want to hear everything that has happened since I came away—­came into exile.  I know about the property and the town that has grown up just as I knew it would.  Tell me about the people—­old Squire Rawson and Phrony, and Wickersham, and Norman and his wife.”

Keith told him about them.  “Rhodes,” he said, as he ended, “you started it and you ought to have stayed with it.  Old Rawson says you foretold it all.”

Suddenly Rhodes flung his cue down on the table and straightened up.  “Keith, this is killing me.  Sometimes I think I can’t stand it another day.  I’ve a mind to chuck up the whole business and cut for it.”

Keith gazed at him in amazement.  The clouded brow, the burning eyes, the drawn mouth, all told how real that explosion was and from what depths it came.  Keith was quite startled.

“It all seems to me so empty, so unreal, so puerile.  I am bored to death with it.  Do you think this is real?” He waved his arms impatiently about him.  “It is all a sham and a fraud.  I am nothing—­nobody.  I am a puppet on a hired stage, playing to amuse—­not myself!—­the Lord knows I am bored enough by it!—­but a lot of people who don’t care any more about me than I do about them.  I can’t stand this.  D——­n it!  I don’t want to make love to any other man’s wife any more than I will have any of them making love to my wife.  I think they are beginning to understand that.  I showed a little puppy the front door not long ago—­an earl, too, or next thing to it, an earl’s eldest son—­for doing what he would no more have dared to do in an Englishman’s house than he would have tried to burn it.  After that, I think, they began to see I might be something.  Keith, do you remember what old Rawson said to us once about marrying?”

Keith had been thinking of it all the evening.

“Keith, I was not born for this; I was born to do something.  But for giving up I might have been like Stevenson or Eads or your man Maury, whom they are all belittling because he did it all himself instead of getting others to do it.  By George!  I hope to live till I build one more big bridge or run one more long tunnel.  Jove! to stand once more up on the big girders, so high that the trees look small below you, and see the bridge growing under your eyes where the old croakers had said nothing would stand!”

Keith’s eyes sparkled, and he reached out his hand; and the other grasped it.

When Keith returned home, he was already in sight of victory.