lessly
dealt with in respect to either his honesty or his courage. Even the
private secretary of His Excellency hesitated to have this rubber
prince and mahogany baron haled before him as a common citizen of
Anchuria. So he sent Goodwin a flowery epistle, each word-petal
dripping with honey, requesting the favour of an interview. Goodwin
replied with an invitation to dinner at his own house.

Before the hour named the American walked over to the Casa Morena,
and greeted his guest frankly and friendly. Then the two strolled, in
the cool of the afternoon, to Goodwin's home in the environs.

The American left Colonel Falcon in a big, cool, shadowed room with a
floor of inlaid and polished woods that any millionaire in the States
would have envied, excusing himself for a few minutes. He crossed a
_patio_, shaded with deftly arranged awnings and plants, and entered
a long room looking upon the sea in the opposite wing of the house.
The broad jalousies were opened wide, and the ocean breeze flowed
in through the room, an invisible current of coolness and health.
Goodwin's wife sat near one of the windows, making a water-color
sketch of the afternoon seascape.

Here was a woman who looked to be happy. And more--she looked to be
content. Had a poet been inspired to pen just similes concerning
her favour, he would have likened her full, clear eyes, with their
white-encircled, gray irises, to moonflowers. With none of the
goddesses whose traditional charms have become coldly classic
would the discerning rhymester have compared her. She was purely
Paradisaic, not Olympian. If you can imagine Eve, after the eviction,
beguiling the flaming warriors and serenely re-entering the Garden,
you will have her. Just so human, and still so harmonious with Eden
seemed Mrs. Goodwin.

When her husband entered she looked up, and her lips curved and
parted; her eyelids fluttered twice or thrice--a movement remindful
(Poesy forgive us!) of the tail-wagging of a faithful dog--and a
little ripple went through her like the commotion set up in a weeping
willow by a puff of wind. Thus she ever acknowledged his coming, were
it twenty times a day. If they who sometimes sat over their wine
in Coralio, reshaping old, diverting stories of the madcap career
of Isabel Guilbert, could have seen the wife of Frank Goodwin that
afternoon in the estimable aura of her happy wifehood, they might
have disbelieved, or have agreed to forget, those graphic annals o