Besides, there was, I'm sure,
a touch of genius about that girl, so that one wouldn't forget her
easily, certainly not in three years. And then, you know, Harber had
had her letters. Not many of them. Perhaps a dozen to the year.
Pitifully few, but they were filled with a wonderful fascination
against which the realities of his wandering life had been powerless
to contend. Like a slender cable they bound him--they held him!
Well, he was in Sydney now, standing on the water-front, beneath a
bright-blue Australian sky, watching the crinkling water in the
Circular Quay as it lifted and fell mightily but easily, and seeing
the black ships ... ah, the ships! Those masterful, much more than
human, entities that slipped about the great world nosing out, up
dark-green tropical rivers in black, fir-bound fjords, through the
white ice-flows of the Arctics, all its romance, all its gold! Three
years hadn't dulled the keen edge of his appetite for all that;
rather had whetted it.
Nevertheless, as he stood there, he was thinking to himself that
he must have done with wandering; the old saw that a rolling
stone gathered no moss was cropping up sharply, warningly, in
his mind. He had in the three years, however--and this is rather
remarkable--accumulated about three thousand dollars.
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