nd smoothed and held toward him. It was utterly still in the
_sala_ but from an upper room came the sound of Richard King's voice,
faint, thick, begging for water, and from somewhere in the distance a
muffled shot ... three shots.

Carter held the message up before Jimsy's eyes:

Carter Van Meter care Purser S. S. _Canopic Naples_
Yes.
HONOR.

CHAPTER XIV

If Stephen Lorimer, far to the north in the safe serenity of the old
house of South Figueroa Street, could have envisaged the three of them
that day his chief concern would not have been for their bodily danger.
It would have seemed to him that the intangible cloud settling down over
them was a more tragic and sinister thing than the _insurrectos_
besieging them, than the thirst which was cracking their lips and
swelling and blackening their tongues.

He was to remember and marvel, long afterward, that his thought on that
date had tugged uneasily toward them all day and evening. Conditions, so
far as he knew, were favorable; the escort for the personage would be a
stout one and under his wing the boy and girl would be safe, and James
King was waiting for them, spinning out his thread of life until they
should come to him. Nevertheless, he found himself acutely unhappy
regarding them, aware of an urgent and instant need of being with them.

They had never, in all their blithe young lives, needed him so cruelly.
He could not have driven back the bandits, but he could have driven back
the clouds of doubt and misery and misunderstanding; he could not have
given them water for their parched throats but he could have given them
to drink of the waters of understanding; he could have relieved the
drought in their wrung young hearts. He would have seen, as only a
looker-on could see, what was happening to them. He would have yearned
over Honor, fronting the bright face of danger so gallantly but stunned
and crushed by the change in Jimsy, over Jimsy himself, setting out to
do an incredibly stupid, incredibly noble deed, absolutely convinced by
the sight of her one-word telegram that she loved Carter (and humbly
realizing that she might well love Carter, the brilliant Carter, better
than his unilluminated self), seeing the thing simply and objectively as
he would be sure to do, deciding on his course and pursuing it as
definitely as he would take a football over the line for a touchd