"The blooms of the almond tree grow in a night and vanish in a morn: the flies hœmerœ take life with the sun and die with the dew: fancy that slippeth in with a gaze goeth out with a wink: and too timely loves have ever the shortest length.
"I write this as thy grief and my folly."
R. GREENE.
CHAPTER I
It was midnight before I saw Ross again. Then I found him by the odour and glow of his cigar and by the glint of the masthead lamp on his bald head.
His burly, masculine figure seemed incongruous among the welter of empty deck-chairs and the futile debris of a voyage—women's wraps, rope quoits, cushions and picture papers. Side by side we leant over the rail, and for a while our tongues were busy with the idiocies that pass for events on a liner—the ship's run, the latest quarrel, and so forth. A pause gave me the opportunity to remind him that he was in the middle of a story.
"Do you really want to hear it?" he asked, surprised. I said that I was interested to know what happened, resisting the temptation to add that I could spare some of the moralising with which he garnished his facts.
"About the hour," he began again, "that Norah received the note, Dick was finishing a second helping of roan antelope by the side of the fire he had described.
'So I followed for hours,' he was saying, 'till the path stopped dead at a drinking pool. Not a trace beyond.'
'Game track,' suggested the stranger on the other side of the fire.