“I daresay you think it funny,” said he at last, “my chumming up, and in your heart of hearts—that is, your business heart (excuse me for being frank)—you must think it strange I should put up my money with a man whom I don’t know in the least. But, man! the truth of the matter is I’m weary for a friend. I have money enough and to spare, but—I’m weary for a friend.
“I’m the lonest man in the world,” went on Leslie, munching his chocolate and gazing at the beautiful scene before him; “the lonest man on God’s earth. What is the matter with me that I should never have found and kept a friend? If God had ever given me anything to love I’d have cherished it, but—there is no God that I can see.”
“Whisht, man,” said Mac. “Dinna talk like that.”
“I know I was wild,” went on Leslie, “before I left England, but other men have been as bad. I quarreled with my father, but other men’s fathers are different from what mine was. He drove me beyond the sea to be an alien and an outcast. I’ve seen drunken loafers in the bars of Sydney, where I was stuck as a remittance man three years; they had friends of a sort—friends who stuck them, but friend or dog never stuck to me.”
“No wumman?” asked M’Gourley, spitting out the remains of the chocolate he was eating, and lighting a vile-looking Hankow cigar.
“I loved a woman once,” said Leslie, staring before him with eyes that saw not Japan or the cypress trees or the azaleas. “Her name was Jane Deering; we were boy and girl together, cousins, and her people lived quite close to mine. We got engaged, and were to have been married, and—she threw me over.”
“For why?” asked Mac.
“Said she didn’t want to get married.”
“Well, that was deefinite.”
“Damned definite. What’s that noise?”