the dining-room beyond, Tancred answered:

"What does one think of the Arabian Nights?"

But there was nothing Arabesque about the meal of which he was then
called upon to partake. It began with oysters, rather brackish but good,
and ended with cheese. Save for some green pigeons with their plumage
undisturbed, and a particularly fiery karri, it was just such a dinner
as the average diner-out enjoys on six nights out of seven. There were
three kinds of French wine and a variety of Dutch liqueurs. During its
service the general held forth, as generals will, on the subject of
nothing at all. And when the meal was done, for several hours the little
group, reunited in the bale-bale, exchanged the usual commonplace views.
During that interchange Tancred kept himself as near as he could to Mrs.
Lyeth, and when at last the party broke up and he found himself alone in
his room he drew a breath which might have been almost accounted one of
relief.

Through the open windows came a heaviness, subtle as the atmosphere of a
seraglio. Beyond, some palms masked a cluster of stars, but from above
rained down the light and messages of other worlds. In the distance was
the surge of the sea, sounding afar the approach and retreat of the
waves. Beneath, in the underbrush, fire-flies glittered, avoiding each
other in abrupt ziz-zags and sudden loops of flame. The moon had not yet
risen, but the sky still was visibly blue.

And as Tancred dropped on a seat he loosened his neck-cloth with a
thrust of the thumb. "That claret was heady," he told himself, and with
a bit of cambric he mopped his brow. But was it the claret? For a little
space he sat gazing at the invitations of the equator. In his ears the
hum of insects still sounded, and to his unheeding eyes the stars danced
their saraband. The sea seemed to beckon and the night to wait.

Thus far his life had been precisely like that of any other
well-nurtured lad of twenty-two. He had been educated at Concord, he was
a graduate of Harvard; but during his school and college days the
refinement of his own home had accompanied him afar. He was one of those
young men, more common now than a few years since, who find it awkward
to utter one word that could not be said aloud in a ball-room. And in
this he was guided less perhaps by good breeding--for breeding, like
every varnish, may cloak the coarsest fibre--than by native comeliness
of thought. He shrank from the distasteful as other men shr