power to make a young man sigh, an old man smile. Potent things that
procure dreams of joy, thoughts of regret; that soften hard hearts, and
can temper a soft one to the hardness of steel. Gifts of heaven--things
of earth . . .

Hollis rummaged in the box.

And it seemed to me, during that moment of waiting, that the cabin of
the schooner was becoming filled with a stir invisible and living as of
subtle breaths. All the ghosts driven out of the unbelieving West by men
who pretend to be wise and alone and at peace--all the homeless ghosts
of an unbelieving world--appeared suddenly round the figure of Hollis
bending over the box; all the exiled and charming shades of loved women;
all the beautiful and tender ghosts of ideals, remembered, forgotten,
cherished, execrated; all the cast-out and reproachful ghosts of friends
admired, trusted, traduced, betrayed, left dead by the way--they all
seemed to come from the inhospitable regions of the earth to crowd
into the gloomy cabin, as though it had been a refuge and, in all the
unbelieving world, the only place of avenging belief. . . . It lasted a
second--all disappeared. Hollis was facing us alone with something small
that glittered between his fingers. It looked like a coin.

"Ah! here it is," he said.

He held it up. It was a sixpence--a Jubilee sixpence. It was gilt; it
had a hole punched near the rim. Hollis looked towards Karain.

"A charm for our friend," he said to us. "The thing itself is of great
power--money, you know--and his imagination is struck. A loyal vagabond;
if only his puritanism doesn't shy at a likeness . . ."