the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother
to educate her son.

The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home
the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of those
pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves visible
to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer heard her
spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of memory.

A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst
punishments a worker can undergo--an enforced holiday. The doctors who
pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in
the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and
my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast and
melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any
human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest
in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers;
but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with
undiscriminating enthusiasm.

In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance I
attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard
who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, imparted
to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in
the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man
had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill
inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different
conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a
Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.