"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?"
"Quite so. Unless a thing was really interesting, stood out, as it were, he had no use for it—nor for man nor woman."
"Lady Folingsby, for instance."
"Do you know, Mostyn, that even to-day, whenever she meets me, I can see one question in her eyes: 'Where is he?' Always, always that. He found life and people so interesting that he couldn't help but be interesting himself. Whatever he was, I never knew a woman speak ill of him. . . . Once a year there comes to me a letter from an artist girl in Paris, written in language that gets into my eyes. There is always the one refrain: 'He will return some day. Say to him that I do not forget.'"