“How soon shall you take possession?” he asked. “I have to make a record of that.”

“I shall start for Indiana to-morrow,” I answered.

“You are prompt,” he replied, deliberately folding in quarters the paper I had just signed. “I hoped you might dine with me before going out; but I fancy New York is pretty tame after the cafés and bazaars of the East.”

His reference to my wanderings angered me again; for here was the point at which I was most sensitive. I was twenty seven and had spent my patrimony; I had tasted the bread of many lands, and I was doomed to spend a year qualifying myself for my grandfather’s legacy by settling down on an abandoned and lonely Indiana farm that I had never seen and had no interest in whatever.

As I rose to go Pickering said:

“It will be sufficient if you drop me a like, say once a month, to let me know you are there. The post-office is Annandale.”

“I suppose I might file a supply of postal cards in the village and arrange for the mailing of one every month.”

“It might be done that way,” he answered evenly.

“We may perhaps meet again, if I don’t die of starvation or ennui. Good-by.”

We shook hands stiffly and I left him, going down in an elevator filled with eager-eyed, anxious men. I, at least, had no cares of business. It made no difference to me whether the market rose or fell. Something of the spirit of adventure that had been my curse quickened in my heart as I walked through crowded Broadway past Trinity Church to a bank and drew the balance remaining on my letter of credit. I received in currency slightly less than one thousand dollars.

As I turned from the teller’s window I ran into the arms of the last man in the world I expected to see.

This, let it be remembered, was in October of the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and one.

CHAPTER II

A FACE AT SHERRY’S

“Don’t mention my name an thou lovest me!” said Laurance Donovan, and he drew me aside, ignored my hand and otherwise threw into our meeting a casual quality that was somewhat amazing in view of the fact that we had met last at Cairo.

“Allah it Allah!”

It was undoubtedly Larry. I felt the heat of the desert and heard the camel-drivers cursing and our Sudanese guides plotting mischief under a window far away.

“Well!” we both exclaimed interrogatively.

He rocked gently back and forth, with his hands in his pockets, on the tile floor of the banking-house. I had seen him stand thus once on a time when we had eaten nothing in four days—it was in Abyssinia, and our guides had lost us in the worst possible place—with the same untroubled look in his eyes.