a flag in the wind.
"Andres!" he cried, "Andres, let her go, she is nothing! Quickly,
before it is too late. Remember--" There was a surging concentration
so rapid that Charles saw it as a constricting menace rather than the
offensive of a group of men. Pilar stooped, her hand at her knee.
Charles threw an arm about Andres, but he was dragged, struggling,
away. She was icy in the hell of the manton. There was a suspension of
breathing, of sound, through which a fragile hand with a knife
searched and searched. Then a shocking blow fell on Charles Abbott's
head and the Tacon Theatre rocked and collapsed in darkness.

* * * * *

The sharp closing of a door brought him, a man advanced in middle age,
abruptly to his feet. He was confused, and swayed dizzily, with
out-stretched arms as though he were grasping vainly for the
dissolving fragments of a shining mirage of youth. They left him,
forever, and he stood regaining his strayed sense of immediacy. He was
surprisingly weary, in a gloom made evident by the indirect
illumination of an arc light across and farther up the street.
Fumbling over the wall he encountered the light switch, and flooded
his small drawing-room with brilliance. The clock on the mantle,
crowned by an eagle with lifted gilded wings, pointed to the first
quarter past eleven: when he had sunk into his abstraction from the
present, wandered back into the sunlight of Havana and his days of
promise, it had been no more than late afternoon; and now Mrs. Vauxn
and her daughter, his neighbors, had returned from their dinner
engagement. He wondered, momentarily, why that hour and ceremony had
passed unattended for him, and then recalled that Bruton and his wife,
who kept his house, had gone to the funeral of a relative, leaving on
the dining-room table, carefully covered, some cuts of cold meat, a
salad of lettuce, bran bread and fresh butter, and the coffee
percolator with its attachment for a plug in the floor.

To the rest, he had faithfully told Mrs. Bruton, who was severe with
him, he'd attend. In place of that he had wandered into an amazing
memory of his beginning manhood. The beginning, he told himself, and,
in many ways the end--since then he had done little or nothing. After
the ignominy of his deportation from Cuba--impending satisfactory
negotiations between the United States and Spain, he gathered later,
had preserved him from the dignity of political martyrdom--a d