hool. "Tomorrow," he promised. The drinks were finished, the cigars
consumed in long ashes, and Andres Escobar rose to go. As they walked
toward the Paseo the Cuban said, "You must be very careful, liberty is
a dangerous word; it is discussed only in private; in our tertulia you
may speak." He held out a straight forward palm. "We shall be
friends."

Again in his room, Charles dwelt on Andres, conscious of the birth of
a great liking, the friendship the other had put into words. He wanted
to be like Andres, as slender and graceful, with his hair in a peak
and a worldly, contained manner. Charles was thin, rather than
slender, more awkward than not; decidedly fragile in appearance. And
his experience of life had been less than nothing. Yet he would make
up for this lack by the fervor of his attachment to the cause of Cuba.
He recalled all the stories he knew of foreign soldiers heroic in an
adopted cause; that was an even more ideal form of service than the
natural attachment to a land of birth.

He moved a chair out on his balcony, and sat above the extended
irregular roof of the Tacon Theatre, watching the dusk flood the white
marble ways. The lengthening shadows of the Parque blurred, joined in
one; the facades were golden and then dimly violet; the Gate of
Montserrat lost its boldness of outline. Cries rose from the streets,
"Cuidado! Cuidado!" and "Narranjas, narranjas dulces." The evening
news sheets were called in long falling inflections.

What surprised him was that, although he had more than an ordinary
affection for his home, his father and mother, now, here, they were of
no importance, no reality, to him. He never, except by an objective
effort, gave the north, the past, a thought. He was carried above
personal relationships and familiar regard; at a blow his old ties
had been severed; the new held him in the grip of their infinite
possibilities. All the petty things of self were obscured in the same
way that the individual aspects of the city below him were being
merged into one dignity of tone.

Yet, at the same time, his mood had a charming reality--the suaveness
of Andres Escobar. His, Charles Abbott's, would be a select, an
aristocratic, fate; the end, when it overtook him, would find him in
beautiful snowy linens, dignified, exclusive, to the last. His would
be no pot-house brawling. That was his double necessity, the highest
form of good in circumstances of the first breeding. One, perhaps, to
his