"Didn't a lady call a few minutes ago?"
The man answered in the negative.
"Hmm. Very well. That's all."
Still puzzling over the strange woman, he removed a pipe and a sack of tobacco from his shirt pocket, and when he had filled the bowl he lighted it. For several minutes he drew upon the amber stem, looking abstractedly into the whorls of smoke; then he picked up a brown volume from the table and opened it at a leaf that was turned under.
Here was another trait that Gaya had not discovered. Frequently when he was tired he turned to poetry—sometimes to books on the art-treasures and ancient lore of India, Indo-China and China—for relaxation.
His eyes followed these lines:
Star of the South that now through orient mist,
At nightfall off Tampico or Belize,
Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas
Where first in me, a fond romanticist,
The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles
Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles.
He rather fancied that passage. Fabulous isles. His brain toyed with the thought. For, although he walked down among mortals, sheathing himself in indifference and impassivity, he kept, in secret, a ladder to the stars—a concession to return at will to a guarded kingdom of his youth, the dominion of Romance and Adventure. He would have dwelt in this kingdom, secluded from earth, but for a thorn that was fastened deep within him. This thorn had pricked him since that period of adolescence when first visions and aspirations stirred in his boyish brain and set him to dreaming of the future. It had goaded him relentlessly into achievement, against the will of his adventurous spirit.
Strive as he might, he could not draw it out.
It was Ambition.