his frame.

"Live!" he repeated, with fierce contempt; "you are making the
common mistake of the whole ignorant herd. You are measuring life
by its length, when its depth alone is of any import. I want no
more than a year or two at the most, and I promise you, Mr. Scarlett
Trent, my most estimable young companion, that, during that year, I
will live more than you in your whole lifetime. I will drink deep
of pleasures which you know nothing of, I will be steeped in joys
which you will never reach more nearly than the man who watches a
change in the skies or a sunset across the ocean! To you, with
boundless wealth, there will be depths of happiness which you will
never probe, joys which, if you have the wit to see them at all,
will be no more than a mirage to you."

Trent laughed outright, easily and with real mirth. Yet in his
heart were sown already the seeds of a secret dread. There was a
ring of passionate truth in Monty's words. He believed what he was
saying. Perhaps he was right. The man's inborn hatred of a second
or inferior place in anything stung him. Were there to be any
niches after all in the temple of happiness to which he could never
climb? He looked back rapidly, looked down the avenue of a squalid
and unlovely life, saw himself the child of drink-sodden and brutal
parents, remembered the Board School with its unlovely surroundings,
his struggles at a dreary trade, his running away and the fierce
draughts of delight which the joy and freedom of the sea had brought
to him on the morning when he had crept on deck, a stowaway, to be
lashed with every rope-end and to do the dirty work of every one.
Then the slavery at a Belgian settlement, the job on a steamer
trading along the Congo, the life at Buckomari, and lastly this bold