"Poor Ted, poor Ted! I'd give my commission to see him once again."

"I believe you would, Debney."

"I knew him to the last button of his nature, and any one who knew him
well could never think hardly of him. There were five of us brothers,
and we all worshipped him. He could run rings round us in everything,
at school, with sports, in the business of life, in love."

Debney's voice fell with the last few words, and there was a sorrowful
sort of smile on his face. His look was fastened on the Farilone
Islands, which lay like a black, half-closed eyelid across the disc of
the huge yellow sun, as it sank in the sky straight out from the Golden
Gate. The long wash of the Pacific was in their ears at their left,
behind them was the Presidio, from which they had come after a visit to
the officers, and before them was the warm, inviting distance of waters,
which lead, as all men know, to the Lotos Isles.

Debney sighed and shook his head. "He was, by nature, the ablest man I
ever knew. Everything in the world interested him."

"There lay the trouble, perhaps."

"Nowhere else. All his will was with the wholesome thing, but his brain,
his imagination were always hunting. He was the true adventurer at the
start. That was it, Mostyn."

"He found the forbidden thing more interesting than--the other?"