"Yes, 'Saint Harry'!" he laughed. "Oh, it's funny, but let them call me any name they please as long as it amuses them. What difference does it make? I am glad Hughie is coming up, I want some music. He puts the mountains into music for me."
"And for me." She smiled and then sighed bitterly, gazing drearily into the fire, now a bed of glowing embers. Then latent and feminine curiosity stirred in her thoughts and voiced itself. "Why are you here?" she said. "Why does a man like you stay here?"
His elbow rested on the arm of his chair, his chin in his hand, his gaze too upon the fading embers. "I don't know," he said in a low voice, "I had to come."
"Where from?" she still followed her instinct of curiosity.
"From the husks"—he turned his head and smiled at her—"from a far country where I had wasted my substance in riotous living."
She frowned a little. She was not used to this type of man, nor had she met any one who used hyperbole in conversation. At first she fancied that he might be chaffing her, but she was too intelligent to harbor that idea, so convincing was his innate sincerity; but nevertheless, she meant to go cautiously.
Again she questioned him: "From what far country?"
He had fallen to musing again, and it is doubtful if he heard her. He saw before him immense, primeval forests, black, shadowy; vast, sluggish rivers, above which hung a thick and fever-laden air; trees from whose topmost branches swung gorgeous, ephemeral flowers; and then long stretches of yellow beach, where a brazen ocean tumbled and hissed. Then many cities, squalid and splendid, colorful and fantastic as the erection of a dream, and through all these he saw himself ever passing, appearing and reappearing, and ever scattering his substance, not the substance of money alone; that was still left him; but the substance of youth, of early promise, of illusion and hopes.
Pearl waited a long time, it seemed to her, for him to speak. At last she broke the silence. "And then?" she said.
He roused from his preoccupations and brushed back the wing of hair from his brow. "I realized that I was living, had always lived on husks, and that was what caused the restless fever in my blood, my heart was always restless; and then I began to dream down there in the tropics, really dream at night of these mountains just as you see them here, and in the day time I thought of them and longed for them, as a man whose throat is dry with thirst longs for cool water. Then, presently, I began to have brief, fleeting visions of them by day. And gradually the longing for the hills became so intense that I started out in search of them. I traveled about a good bit, and then drifted here. The place suited me, so I stayed."