smoked silently. "I beg your pardon, but where did you say I was
going?"

Out of the mist where he had been leaning over the side, and gazing
earnestly into the surrounding obscurity, now came a pale young man,
and put his arm in mine.

"I see," said he, "that you have rather a general acquaintance, and,
as you know many persons, perhaps you know many things. I am young,
you see, but I am a great traveller. I have been all over the world,
and in all kinds of conveyances; but," he continued, nervously,
starting continually, and looking around, "I haven't yet got abroad."

"Not got abroad, and yet you have been everywhere?"

"Oh! yes; I know," he replied, hurriedly; "but I mean that I haven't
yet got away. I travel constantly, but it does no good--and perhaps
you can tell me the secret I want to know. I will pay any sum for
it. I am very rich and very young, and, if money cannot buy it, I will
give as many years of my life as you require."

He moved his hands convulsively, and his hair was wet upon his
forehead. He was very handsome in that mystic light, but his eye
burned with eagerness, and his slight, graceful frame thrilled with
the earnestness of his emotion. The Emperor Hadrian, who loved the boy
Antinous, would have loved the youth.

"But what is it that you wish to leave behind?" said I, at length,
holding his arm paternally; "what do you wish to escape?"