st be
suffering under the praises of the Spaniard. And Stuart was indeed so
embarrassed that he flushed under his tan, and assured Clay, while
shaking hands with them all, that he was delighted to make his
acquaintance; at which the others laughed, and Stuart came to himself
sufficiently to laugh with them, and to accept Clay's invitation to
dine with them later.

They found the two boys waiting in the cafe of the restaurant where
they had arranged to meet, and they ascended the steps together to the
table on the balcony that Clay had reserved for them.

The young engineer appeared at his best as host. The responsibility of
seeing that a half-dozen others were amused and content sat well upon
him; and as course followed course, and the wines changed, and the
candles left the rest of the room in darkness and showed only the table
and the faces around it, they all became rapidly more merry and the
conversation intimately familiar.

Clay knew the kind of table-talk to which the Langhams were accustomed,
and used the material around his table in such a way that the talk
there was vastly different. From King he drew forth tales of the
buried cities he had first explored, and then robbed of their ugliest
idols. He urged MacWilliams to tell carefully edited stories of life
along the Chagres before the Scandal came, and of the fastnesses of the
Andes; and even Stuart grew braver and remembered "something of the
same sort" he had seen at Fort Nilt, in Upper Burma.

"Of course," was Clay's comment at the conclusion of one of these
narratives, "being an Englishman, Stuart left out the point of the
story, which was that he blew in the gates of the fort with a charge of
dynamite. He got a D. S. O. for doing it."

"Being an Englishman," said Hope, smiling encouragingly on the
conscious Stuart, "he naturally would leave that out."

Mr. Langham and his daughters formed an eager audience. They had never
before met at one table three men who had known such experiences, and
who spoke of them as though they must be as familiar in the lives of
the others as in their own--men who spoiled in the telling stories that
would have furnished incidents for melodramas, and who impressed their
hearers more with what they left unsaid, and what was only suggested,
than what in their view was the most important point.

The dinner came to an end at last, and Mr. Langham proposed that they
should go down and walk with the people in the plaza;