“I don’t know that I’ve any better reason,” Davenant laughed, snipping off the end of his cigar, “than that which leads the ox to his stall—­because he knows the way.”

“Good!” Guion laughed, rather loudly.  Then, stopping abruptly, he continued, “I fancy you know your way pretty well in any direction you want to go, don’t you?”

“I can find it—­if I know where I’m going.  I came back to Boston chiefly because that was just what I didn’t know.”

“He means,” Rodney Temple explained, “that he’d got out of his beat; and so, like a wise man, he returns to his starting-point.”

“I’d got out of something more than my beat; I’d got out of my element.  I found that the life of elegant leisure on which I’d embarked wasn’t what I’d been cut out for.”

“That’s interesting—­very,” Guion said.  “How did you make the discovery?”

“By being bored to death.”

“Bored?—­with all your money?”

“The money isn’t much; but, even if it were, it couldn’t go on buying me a good time.”

“That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be; doesn’t it, Rodney?”

“It depends somewhat,” Rodney replied, “on the purchasing power of money.  There are things not to be had for cash.”

“I’m afraid my conception of a good time,” Davenant smiled, “might be more feasible without the cash than with it.  After all, money would be a doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to gather honey.”

“A bee,” Guion observed, “isn’t the product of a high and complex civilization—­”

“Neither am I,” Davenant declared, with a big laugh.  “I spring from the primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who, when they don’t work, have no particular object in living on.”

“And so you’ve come back to Boston to work?”

“To work—­or something.”

“You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of—­something.”

“Only because it’s better than nothing.  It’s been nothing for so long now that I’m willing to make it anything.”

“Make what—­anything?”

“My excuse for remaining on earth.  If I’m to go on doing that, I’ve got to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my hotel bill.”

“You’re luckier than you know to be able to do that much,” Guion said, with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position.  “But you’ve been uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven’t you?  Made some money out of that mine business, didn’t you?  Or was it in sugar?”

Davenant laughed.  “A little,” he admitted.  “But, to any one like you, sir, it would seem a trifle.”

“To any one like me!  Listen.”  He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so.  “For half a million dollars I’d sell my soul.”

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly, while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.