me always, one of my oldest friends and, as well, a mind of the first
water whose power and achievements were for me a constant inspiration
as they were, I know, for scores other.

Coincidentally with my recognition came a shock of surprise,
definitely--unpleasant. It was Throckmartin--but about him was
something disturbingly unlike the man I had known long so well and to
whom and to whose little party I had bidden farewell less than a month
before I myself had sailed for these seas. He had married only a few
weeks before, Edith, the daughter of Professor William Frazier,
younger by at least a decade than he but at one with him in his ideals
and as much in love, if it were possible, as Throckmartin. By virtue
of her father's training a wonderful assistant, by virtue of her own
sweet, sound heart a--I use the word in its olden sense--lover. With
his equally youthful associate Dr. Charles Stanton and a Swedish
woman, Thora Halversen, who had been Edith Throckmartin's nurse from
babyhood, they had set forth for the Nan-Matal, that extraordinary
group of island ruins clustered along the eastern shore of Ponape in
the Carolines.

I knew that he had planned to spend at least a year among these ruins,
not only of Ponape but of Lele--twin centres of a colossal riddle of
humanity, a weird flower of civilization that blossomed ages before
the seeds of Egypt were sown; of whose arts we know little enough and
of whose science nothing. He had carried with him unusually complete
equipment for the work he had expected to do and which, he hoped,
would be his monument.

What then had brought Throckmartin to Port Moresby, and what was that
change I had sensed in him?