were gleaming; long
rows of them were festooned for blocks in all directions, blazing forth
in fanciful designs. In a short time now the Rex parade would be under
way, with its countless floats depicting "The Age of Romance."

"Romance, indeed!" smiled Mr. Van Dam, contentedly. Why _this_ was the
age of romance. Something recalled Mr. Banniman's parting words to
him--"bad money!" The young man paused abruptly. "Bad money!" What a
coincidence! He pictured a safe sunk into a library wall, an open
cash-drawer jammed with neatly pinned packages of crisp, new ten-dollar
bank-notes. Then he recalled the story of the garrulous old shop-woman.

Roly came to himself with a jerk. He began to laugh.

"Good Lord!" said he, aloud. "I wonder if Cousin Alfred's money was
counterfeit!"

He was still smiling as he bought a white gardenia and placed it in his
buttonhole.

ROPE'S END

I

A round moon flooded the thickets with gold and inky shadows. The night
was hot, poisonous with the scent of blossoms and of rotting tropic
vegetation. It was that breathless, overpowering period between the
seasons when the trades were fitful, before the rains had come. From the
Caribbean rose the whisper of a dying surf, slower and fainter than the
respirations of a sick man; in the north the bearded, wrinkled Haytian
hills lifted their scowling faces. They were trackless, mysterious,
darker even than the history of the island.

Beneath a thatched roof set upon four posts was a table, spread with
food, and on it a candle burned steadily. No wind came out of the hot
darkness; the flame rose straight and unwavering. Under a similar
thatched shed, a short distance away, a group of soldiers were busy
around a smoldering cook-fire. There were other huts inside the jungle
clearing, through the dilapidated walls of which issued rays of light
and men's voices.

Petithomme Laguerre, colonel of tirailleurs, in the army of the
Republic, wiped the fat of a roasted pig from his lips with the back of
his hand. Using his thumb-nail as a knife-blade, he loosened a splinter
from the edge of the rickety wooden table, fashioned it into a
toothpick, then laid himself back in a grass hammock. He had expected to
find rum in the house of Julien Rameau, but either there had been none
or his brave soldiers had happened upon it; at any rate, supper had been
a dry meal--only one of several disappointments of the day. The sack of
the village had not been