It is big, and it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed to make it intelligible." He read, and as he read he watched her.

At last he had reached her, he thought.

She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him, scarcely breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the witchery of the thing he had created.

He had entitled the story "Adventure," and it was the apotheosis of adventure--not of the adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to royal culminations and lordly achievements.
It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and it was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened.

Her eyes were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it seemed to him that she was almost panting.