"I’d known Bert Mackay since college days, when for a couple of years we had roomed together and established one of the priceless understandings of life. The affection that lay between us was closer than that of brothers, close enough mutually to excuse our faults in each other’s eyes. He became an electrical engineer, went to New York, and rose rapidly in his profession; while I, as you know, followed the sea. Every now and then I’d come to New York; and while in port, would move my things uptown and live with him. He was well connected, knew many groups of interesting people, and seemed, to my eye, to be living the richest sort of life. Our intermittent relation was an ideal one for two friends; our intimacy grew closer, as voyage followed voyage, and I supposed there wasn’t an adventure of his that I didn’t know about. But I might have realized, of course, that when the bolt of divine retribution actually struck him, it would be the last subject on which he’d give me his confidence. "However that may be, I wasn’t aware of any trouble, hadn’t anticipated disaster, and was both shocked and alarmed, on my arrival in New York one summer, to find a brief note from him saying that he had gone away. He gave no address, and told me not to hunt for him. The letter was four or five months old. ’I am trying to do the right thing’ he wrote ’God knows, I’ve done enough wrong things. Perhaps you’ll hear from me again, perhaps you won’t. It will depend on how I feel. I’m throwing up the whole game here. Something pretty hard has come into my life, and I have got to go. I must work this out alone. There isn’t much of a chance—but that doesn’t matter. The price has to be paid just the same’ Then, after a few instructions about some of his private affairs, he asked me to forgive him, said I was not to worry, and assured me of his unfailing affection. "You can imagine how the news took hold of me. The nature of the affair was unmistakeable; a tragedy of the heart had overtaken him—the fate that I’d often lightly predicted, and that he as often had expressed a willingness to find. Well, he was saved now, it would seem. I wondered.... Searching the past for a clue to this untoward development, I recalled his air of mingled restraint and melancholy at the time of our last meeting, the year before. I had noticed it only to put it down to one of his many incomprehensible moods. The night of my departure, I remembered, after we’d come in from the theatre, he had spent hours, it seemed, on the couch in the studio living-room, strumming on an old guitar and singing to himself in an incoherent form of improvisation, a habit of his when he was feeling especially blue. I’d been trying to write some letters, and the maddening mournful sounds, with the notes of the guitar picking through, had at length driven me to desperation.