Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE MAN FROM AFAR. It was an evening in late April. Gerald Aspen sat at a little table in the dining-room of the Voyagers’?a little table that he was especially fond of. It was a window-table, and now, as the blinds were not drawn, he could look out into the darkness beyond and see the black bulk of the square, cinctured by its stars of light burning with a gem-like brilliancy in the clear air. It had been a cold, raw April, as April often is, and it was very pleasant to sit there in the warm, bright room with its soft carpets and its crimson-shaded lamps and candles, and its bright fire at either end, and to look out upon that vague mass of light and darkness which a famous painter would call a harmony in gold and sable, and delicately appreciate without experiencing the stinging chill of the atmosphere outside. A whimsical recollection crossed Gerald’s mind of that old poetic tale of the bird which flew for a moment out of the wintry darkness into the blazing hall and then flew out again, and how the wise man commented thereupon and saw in the swift passage of the bird from darkness through light to darkness an allegory of the life of man. The dining-room of the Voyagers was an exceedingly pleasant room. Between seven and nine it was generally pretty crowded with men of all ages and types, from the smart young men about town, brilliantly attired, who banquetted there with other splendid creatureslike themselves, on their way to the Gaiety Theatre, to grizzled explorers, with skins like old mahogany, who strolled about London in a garb that suggested more the jungle and the reedy African river than the neighborhood of Piccadilly. Here came men who knew and liked the Never- Never Land better than Piccadilly; men who still cherished the theory that Leichardt…