Tarzan entered the smoking-room, and sought a chair a little apart
from the others who were there. He felt in no mood for conversation,
and as he sipped his absinth he let his mind run rather sorrowfully
over the past few weeks of his life. Time and again he had wondered
if he had acted wisely in renouncing his birthright to a man to whom
he owed nothing. It is true that he liked Clayton, but--ah, but
that was not the question. It was not for William Cecil Clayton,
Lord Greystoke, that he had denied his birth. It was for the woman
whom both he and Clayton had loved, and whom a strange freak of
fate had given to Clayton instead of to him.

That she loved him made the thing doubly difficult to bear, yet
he knew that he could have done nothing less than he did do that
night within the little railway station in the far Wisconsin woods.
To him her happiness was the first consideration of all, and his
brief experience with civilization and civilized men had taught him
that without money and position life to most of them was unendurable.

Jane Porter had been born to both, and had Tarzan taken them away
from her future husband it would doubtless have plunged her into
a life of misery and torture. That she would have spurned Clayton
once he had been stripped of both his title and his estates never
for once occurred to Tarzan, for he credited to others the same
honest loyalty that was so inherent a quality in himself. Nor,
in this instance, had he erred. Could any one thing have further
bound Jane Porter to her promise to Clayton it would have been in
the nature of some such misfortune as this overtaking him.

Tarzan's thoughts drifted from the past to the future. He tried