nd the other had
replied with a single ominous word, Spain.

There was, it was brought out, a growing and potent, but secretive,
spirit of rebellion against the Government, to which Seville was
retaliating with the utmost open violence. This was spread not so much
through the people, the country, at large, as it was concentrated in the
cities, in Santiago de Cuba and Havana; and there it was practically
limited to the younger members of aristocratic families. Every week
boys--they were no more for all their sounding pronunciamientos--were
being murdered in the fosses of Cabanas fortress. Women of the
greatest delicacy, suspected of sympathy with nationalistic ideals,
were thrown into the filthy pens of town prostitutes. Everywhere a
limitless system of espionage was combating the gathering of circles,
tertulias, for the planning of a Cuba liberated from a bloody and
intolerable tyranny.

Were these men, Charles pressed his query, really as young as himself?
Younger, some of them, by five and six years. And they were shot by a
file of soldiers' muskets? Eight students at the university had been
executed at once for a disproved charge that they had scrawled an
insulting phrase on the glass door of the tomb of a Cuban Volunteer.
At this the elder Abbott had looked so dubious that Charles hastily
abandoned his questioning. Enough of that sort of thing had been
shown; already his mother was unalterably opposed to Cuba; and there
he intended at any price to go. But those tragedies and reprisals, the
champion of his determination insisted, were limited, as he had begun
by saying, to the politically involved. No more engaging or safer city
than Havana existed for the delight of young travelling Americans with
an equal amount of money and good sense. He had proceeded to indicate
the temperate pleasures of Havana; but, then, Charles Abbott had no
ear for sensuous enjoyment. His mind was filled by the other vision of
heroic youth dying for the ideal of liberty.

He had never before given Cuba, under Spanish rule, a thought; but at
a chance sentence it dominated him completely; all his being had been
tinder for the spark of its romantic spirit. This, naturally, he had
carefully concealed from his parents, for, during the days that
immediately followed, Cuba as a possibility was continuously argued.
Soon his father, basing his decision on Charles' gravity of character,
was in favor of the change; and in the end his mother, at who