“The point is, Bedient has kept something through the years, that I haven’t.  I’m getting away badly, but I trust what I mean will clear up....  Bedient and I rode together with an American pack-train, when there was fighting, there in Luzon.  He was the cook of the outfit, and he took me in, a cub-correspondent.  I look back now upon some of those talks (with the smell of coffee and forage and cigarettes in the night air) as belonging to the few perfect things.  And last night and the night before, we talked again——­”

Cairns’ eye hurried past Mrs. Wordling, but he seemed to find what he wanted in the glances of the others, before he resumed: 

“Without knowing it, Bedient has made me see that I haven’t been keeping even decently white, here in New York.  I found out, at the same time, that I couldn’t meet him half-way, when he brought the talk close.  Back yonder in Luzon, I used to.  Here, after the years, I couldn’t.  Something inside is green and untrained.  It shied before real man-talk....  Bedient came into a fortune recently, the result of saving a captain during a long-ago typhoon.  His property is down in Equatoria, where he has been for some months.  So he has had a windfall that would be unmanning to most, yet he comes up here, just as unspoiled as he used to be——­”

“David,” Bedient pleaded, “you’re swinging around in a circle.  Be easy with me.”

“You’ve kept your boy’s heart, that’s what I’m trying to get at,” Cairns added briefly.

Kate Wilkes dropped her hand upon Bedient’s arm, and said, “Don’t bother him.  It looks to me as if truth were being born.  You’d have to be a city man or woman to understand how rare and relishable such an event is.”

“Thanks, Kate,” said Cairns.  “It’s rather difficult to express, but I see I’m beginning to get it across.”

“Go on, please.”

Cairns mused absently before continuing: 

“Probably it doesn’t need to come home to anyone else, as it did to me....  I’ve been serving King Quantity here in New York so long that I’d come to think it the proper thing to do.  Bedient has kept to the open—­the Bright Open—­and kept his ideals.  I listened to him last night and the night before, ashamed of myself.  His dreams came forth fresh and undefiled as a boy’s—­only they were man-strong and flexible—­and his voice seemed to come from behind the intention of Fate....  I wouldn’t talk this way, only I chose the people here.  I think without saying more, you’ve got what I’ve been encountering since Bedient blew up Caribbean way.”

Cairns leaned back in his chair with a glass of moselle in his hand and told about the big lands in Equatoria, about the two Spaniards, Jaffier and Rey, trying to assassinate each other under the cover of courtesy; about the orchestrelle, the mines and the goats.  Cleverly, at length, he drew Bedient into telling the typhoon adventure.