He put the drawer back in the cabinet and passed out.  Glancing in at the big chair he saw Polly just tiptoeing from the room.  Tom’s head lay back, and his breathing was softly heavy, the sickness pronouncedly apparent on his relaxed face.

V

“I have worked hard,” Frederick explained to Polly that evening on the veranda, unaware that when a man explains it is a sign his situation is growing parlous.  “I have done what came to my hand—­how creditably it is for others to say.  And I have been paid for it.  I have taken care of others and taken care of myself.  The doctors say they have never seen such a constitution in a man of my years.  Why, almost half my life is yet before me, and we Travers are a long-lived stock.  I took care of myself, you see, and I have myself to show for it.  I was not a waster.  I conserved my heart and my arteries, and yet there are few men who can boast having done as much work as I have done.  Look at that hand.  Steady, eh?  It will be as steady twenty years from now.  There is nothing in playing fast and loose with oneself.”

And all the while Polly had been following the invidious comparison that lurked behind his words.

“You can write ‘Honourable’ before your name,” she flashed up proudly.  “But my father has been a king.  He has lived.  Have you lived?  What have you got to show for it?  Stocks and bonds, and houses and servants—­pouf!  Heart and arteries and a steady hand—­is that all?  Have you lived merely to live?  Were you afraid to die?  I’d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.  When you are dust, my father will be ashes.  That is the difference.”

“But my dear child—­” he began.

“What have you got to show for it?” she flamed on.  “Listen!”

From within, through the open window, came the tinkling of Tom’s ukulele and the rollicking lilt of his voice in an Hawaiian hula.  It ended in a throbbing, primitive love-call from the sensuous tropic night that no one could mistake.  There was a burst of young voices, and a clamour for more.  Frederick did not speak.  He had sensed something vague and significant.

Turning, he glanced through the window at Tom, flushed and royal, surrounded by the young men and women, under his Viking moustache lighting a cigarette from a match held to him by one of the girls.  It abruptly struck Frederick that never had he lighted a cigar at a match held in a woman’s hand.

“Doctor Tyler says he oughtn’t to smoke—­it only aggravates,” he said; and it was all he could say.

As the fall of the year came on, a new type of men began to frequent the house.  They proudly called themselves “sour-doughs,” and they were arriving in San Francisco on the winter’s furlough from the gold-diggings of Alaska.  More and more of them came, and they pre-empted a large portion of one of the down-town hotels.  Captain Tom was fading with the season, and almost lived in the big chair.  He drowsed oftener and longer, but whenever he awoke he was surrounded by his court of young people, or there was some comrade waiting to sit and yarn about the old gold days and plan for the new gold days.