The newspaper clipping that Betty had treasured was enclosed, that he might read for himself the story of Tusitala that had left such an impression on her.
The letter touched him as nothing had done for years, and he read it a second time while he was going up to his office on the elevated.

Then at lunch-time, while he waited in his club-room, for lunch to be served, he took it out and read it again.

All that busy day between the demands that business made on him, and once even in the midst of dictating to his typewriter, his thoughts kept turning to that far-away island in the Southern seas, where Tusitala's road gleams white under the tropic sun.
He had met Robert Louis Stevenson once, the tale-teller of Eugenia's story, and he well understood the influence of that noble life over the old chiefs who called him "brother." The words that Eugenia had quoted in her letter rang in his ears all day, every way he turned: "_Fame dies and honours perish, but loving-kindness is immortal._" He seemed to hear them when a poor woman came into his office, asking for a position for her son.

They stopped the curt refusal on his lips, and caused him to take half an hour of his precious time to help her.
He heard them again when a case was reported to him of a man living in one of his tenement-houses, who could not pay his rent because he was too ill to work, and could not hope to recover in his present surroundings.

The stifling heat of the crowded tenement was killing him.
In his weakened condition he was slowly sinking under his burden of debt and worry, and the thought that his helpless family was almost starving and would be left uncared for when he died.
Mr.Forbes turned away with an impatient frown from his collector's report, but that voice from far Samoa seemed to speak again.