At the end of a year, when his duties had become a matter of routine and his life had lost the charm of novelty, David's ambitions started from their slumbers, though not this time in a political way. Wilder had cruised away, and the young consul was conscious of a sense of aloneness. He spent his evenings on his spacious veranda, from where he could see the moonlight making a rippling road of silver across the black water. The sensuous beauty of the tropical nights brought him back to his early Land of Dreams, and the pastime that he had been forced to relinquish for action now appealed to him with overwhelming force and fascination. But the dreams were a man's dreams, not the fleeting fancies of a boy. They continued to possess and absorb him until one night, when he was looking above the mountains at one lone star that shone brighter than the rest, he was moved for the first time to give material shape and form to his conceptions. The impulse led to execution. "I must get it out of my system," he explained half apologetically to himself as he began the writing of a novel. To this task, as to everything else he had undertaken, he brought the entire concentration of his mind and energy, until the book soon began to seem real to him--more real than anything he had done. As he was copying the last page for the last time, Fletcher sailed into the harbor for a week of farewell before returning to New York. "What have you been doing for amusement these last six months, Dunne?" he asked as he dropped into David's house. "You'd never guess," said David, "what your absence drove me to. I've written a book--a novel." "Let me take it back to the hotel with me to-night. I haven't been sleeping well lately, and it may--" "If it serves as a soporific," said David gravely, as he handed him the bulky package, "my labor will not have been in vain." The next morning Wilder came again into David's office. "I fear you didn't sleep well, after all," observed David, looking at his visitor's heavy-lidded eyes. "No, darn you, Dunne. I took up your manuscript and I never laid it down until the first streaks of dawn. Then when I went to bed I lay awake thinking it all over. Why, Dunne, it's the best book I ever read!" "I wish," David replied with a whimsical smile, "that you were a publisher." "Speaking of publishers, that's why I didn't bring the manuscript back. I sail in a week, and I want you to let me take it to a publisher I know in New York. He will give it a prompt reading." "If it wouldn't bother you too much, I wish you would. You see, it would take so long for it to come back here and be sent out again each time it is rejected." "Rejected!" scoffed Wilder. "You wait and see! Aren't you going to dedicate it?" David hesitated, his eyes stealing dreamily out across the bay to the horizon line. "I wonder," he said meditatively, "if the person to whom it is dedicated--every word of it--wouldn't know without the inscription."