ve never forgotten the
old one.'

The Baroness laughed and made fun of this proclamation, which was
accompanied by certain old-fashioned bows and flourishes of deportment.

'But now,' she said, 'I must really run away and look after my patient,
and must leave you, gentlemen, to console each other for my loss. I left
Mrs. Diedrich asleep, and could just afford to snatch half an hour for
so old a friend as you, Colonel If you care to come back and have tea
with me at six, I shall be glad to meet you, if I may dare run away
again. But if I _should_ be compelled to send down my excuses, you will
understand.'

She had already started a movement towards the hotel, and the two men
sauntered along with her, one on either side. She left them in the
flower-perfumed dimness of the shaded hall, and the whole business of
the afternoon had by this time so explained and reconciled itself to
Paul's mind that he would have been a brute to fret about it longer.

'I say,' said the Colonel, 'I have been for three years outside
civilization, and I should like a John Collins. I came here last night
by the Messagerie Maritime. They are good people, and they cook as well
as anybody can be expected to cook outside the United States, but
their ideas of drink are curiously simple. Can you be my guide, Mr.
Armstrong?'

'Need I guide you farther?' asked Paul 'I should fancy that your
materials are to be found here in an absurd plenty, and if you have a
skilful hand----'

'Sir,' said the Colonel, with a burlesque flourish, interrupting him,
'there is not a man from Marble Head to the Golden Gate who can make a
John Collins to compare with mine.'

Paul knew the house, and led his new acquaintance to a shady veranda
where a polyglot waiter chipped his ice to his fancy, found him lemon,
pounded sugar, fresh mint, square-faced Hollands, and syphon-water, and
left the Colonel compounding in a high state of content.

'This is like home,' he said, 'bar the celestial straw, the use of which
these blahsted Continentals have not learned. This is quite like home.
Three years I have been roughing it, up hill and down dale, camp and
field Seen a little bit o'fightin' on the Burmah side 'long of your
British troops.

Mr. Armstrong; better boys I do _not_ want to meet And here's to them
and you, sir. But, Lord!'--he caressed his tumbler with a lean brown
hand, and looked contemplatively into space--'I must smoke. Try a
Burmese cigarette, sir. Lord 'I l