With my returning strength came the recurrent desire to depart from the place forever. Also, in spite of all I could do, the thought of my gold—lying in the thicket, the treasure for which I had laboured so hard—would persist in returning. I tried to banish the dream of avarice, but it is a fearsome clutch which riches maintain on the imagination of poor, weak man. I felt quite convinced that great as my longing was for the world outside, that of the goddess was ten-fold greater. Of this I spoke, one day, when my restored condition gave promise that I should not fail for lack of strength in what I might undertake. Into the eyes of that faithful girl came a burning light, which would have made the heart of any man bound with feeling. She spoke, however, with her usual control. “I should like to leave this place,” she said, “but I prefer to wait until you are strong and masterful, as you were when I saw you first.” At this it was on my tongue to speak of the future, and of certain hopes which had grown in my thoughts, of a home to be and of happiness, but I curbed this desire as being untimely while she depended so entirely upon myself for deliverance. Having dwelt no little on the prospect of the future in this camp, in which—unless we escaped—I could see my own skeleton hung up on a stump, and with no fine plating of gold upon it, either, I had small desire to remain in the land another day. Strangely enough, however, I had no sooner begun to make our preparations for leaving, than memory dragged in every happy day I had spent with my Links, every thrill of triumph in my puny successes, every faithful or affectionate deed which these simple, half-animal creatures had ever performed toward myself. I own I was foolishly attached to a number of the poor forest-children, who watched me always with such a dumb look of regard, and wonder as to what I was. It is not a boast to say that I had wrought an ineradicable effect upon these less than merely primitive people. In turn they had been my willing slaves, my companions—my everything of life. I thought of Little Tike, and blessed his memory for the days of real enjoyment he had given me when I was mending from a serious injury once before. But after all—there was that gilded skeleton to think about and to dread. What profit was it to a skeleton that sundry Missing Links still adored the ground before it? I preferred to be a man of meat, unadored for the rest of my life, rather than to be a gold-plated pile of bones, worshipped madly throughout the centuries to come.