And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life.

He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

“... Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?” she was saying. 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them.” She looked at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,” she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard — the ripple of