In his way he was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the same seriousness.  What eluded him was precisely that human element which was the primary object of his quest.  He learned to recognize the beauty of a picture or a mountain more or less at sight; but the soul of these things, of which he thought more than of their outward aspects, the soul that looks through the eyes and speaks with the tongues of peoples, remained inaccessible to his yearnings.  He was always outside—­never more than a tourist.  He made acquaintances by the wayside easily enough, but only of the rootless variety, beginning without an introduction and ending without a farewell.  There was nothing that “belonged” to him, nothing to which he himself “belonged.”

It was the persistency of the defect that had marked most of his life, even that portion of it spent in Boston and Waverton—­the places he called “home.”  He was their citizen only by adoption, as only by adoption he was the son of Tom and Sarah Davenant.  That intimate claim—­the claim on the family, the claim on the soil—­which springs of birth and antedates it was not his, and something had always been lacking to his life because of the deficiency.  Too healthily genial to feel this want more than obscurely, he nevertheless had tried to remedy it by resorting to the obvious means.  He had tried to fall in love, with a view to marriage and a family.  Once, perhaps twice, he might have been successful had it not been for the intrusive recollection of a moment, years before, when a girl whom he knew to be proud without suspecting how proud she was had in answer to the first passionate words he ever uttered started to her feet, and, fanning herself languidly, walked away.  The memory of that instant froze on his tongue words that might have made him happy, sending him back into his solitary ways.  They were ways, as he saw plainly enough, that led no whither; for which reason he had endeavored, as soon as he was financially justified, to get out of them by taking a long holiday and traveling round the world.

He was approaching the end of his second journey when the realization came to him that as far as his great object was concerned the undertaking had been a failure.  He was as much outside the broader current of human sympathies as ever.  Then, all at once, he began to see the reason why.

The first promptings to this discovery came to him one spring evening as he stood on the deck of the steam-launch he had hired at Shanghai to go up and down the Yangste-Kiang.  Born in China, the son of a medical missionary, he had taken a notion to visit his birthplace at Hankow.  It was a pilgrimage he had shirked on his first trip to that country, a neglect for which he afterward reproached himself.  All things considered, to make it was as little as he could do in memory of the brave man and woman to whom he owed his existence.