“Davy, I breathed a bit of open that Sunday--so that I could see, but the next morning it closed about me again. It was Mr. Prentidd who helped me out. They stole from him and lied to him. Face to face, eye to eye, old Seth Wetherbee, the Quaker, lied to him, taking hundreds of dollars in the lie--millionaires taking hundreds of dollars from a poor inventor. I had the book of the London transaction before me, which showed the truth as they talked, and Mr. Sproxley came and took the book from me, and shut it in the safe.... And then when I left, they knew I had their secrets. You wondered why they called me a thief, when I was not. It was plain, Davy, to spoil anything I might say about their methods. Instantly they discredited me, because I was one of six or seven in the office who knew that they were thieves and liars. And why did they fire you to-day for lunching with me? Because they were afraid of what I might have told you. And why did they send Broadwell to Philadelphia when they knew he was to have lunch with me? For fear of what I might tell Broadwell. Even now they will not tell the different floors that I am exonerated.... But they are afraid, Davy--that’s their hell. That is their life--fear and the lie. Imagine men standing straight up to heaven--spines lifted from the ground, but going back to the ground--who knows but their souls already belly-down?--because they break the hearts of men, and live with fear and the lie.” He told of Fleury and Stackhouse and the Faraway Woman--of McArliss, of striking the reef, and day by day in the open boat.... Davy’s eyes bulged. The boy saw Stackhouse at one end and quiet manhood in the other. He sat with Bellair, whom he could understand, in the point of balance between these forces. Bellair told of the stars and the child, and the distance from which they viewed the little things of the world and the grand simplicity of God. He pictured the man Fleury had become--the straight-seeing, the fearless, the ignited man, who mastered the lie in his heart and the animal in his abdomen--the man he, Bellair, wanted to be, and wanted Davy to be.... The _Formahaut_ came, with Spika agleam to the northward, and Fleury died--the picture in his mind of a man, rising rather than falling.... Bellair told him of the first moment he heard the real voice of Fleury, as he stood on the tilted deck of the _Jade_ in the dark, while he went back for water.... “I’ll hold a place for you!”