ensation of remoteness from the flesh;
his purpose killed earthly desire. He thought of himself now as
dedicated to that: Charles reviewed the comfortable amount of his
letter of credit, his personal qualifications, the derringer mounted
in mother-of-pearl, in the light of one end. It annoyed him that he
couldn't, at once, plunge into this with Domingo Escobar; but,
whenever he approached that ordinarily responsive gentleman with
anything political, he grew morose and silent, or else, more maddening
still, deliberately put Charles' interest aside. The derringer,
however, brought out an unexpected and gratifying stir.

Escobar had stopped in Charles' cabin, and the latter, with a studied
air of the casual, displayed the weapon on his berth. "You must throw
it away," Escobar exclaimed dramatically; "at once, now, through the
porthole."

"I can't do that," Charles explained; "it was a gift from my father;
besides, I'm old enough for such things."

"A gift from your father, perhaps," the other echoed; "but did he tell
you, I wonder, how you were going to get it into Cuba? Did he explain
what the Spanish officials would do if they found you with a pistol?
Dama de Caridad, do you suppose Cuba is New York! The best you could
hope for would be deportation. Into the sea with it."

But this Charles Abbott refused to do, though he would, he agreed,
conceal it beyond the ingenuity of Spain; and Escobar left him in a
muttering anger. Charles felt decidedly encouraged: a palpable degree
of excitement, of tense anticipation, had been granted him.

* * * * *

Yet his first actual breath of the tropics, of Cuba, was very
different, charged and surcharged with magical peace: the steamer was
enveloped in an evening of ineffable lovely blueness. The sun faded
from the world of water and left an ultramarine undulating flood with
depths of clear black, the sky was a tender gauze of color which, as
night approached, was sewn with a glimmer that became curiously
apparent, seemingly nearby, stars. The air that brushed Charles'
cheek was slow and warm; its warmth was fuller, heavier with potency,
than any summer he had known. Accelerating his imagination it
dissipated his energies; he lounged supine in his chair, long past
midnight, lulled by the slight rise and fall of the sea, gathered up
benignly into the beauty above him.

Later he had to stir himself into the energy of packing, for the
Morro Castle wa