ether he is _a_
man as well as _the_ man."

I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished,
for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they
gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they
managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and
civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my
pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of
war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the
strength of the enemy.

A sort of cold dismay--something akin to fear--filled me when I had
estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so
deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and
hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless,
haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in
turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for
him to have. But I left him whole--I had to make bitter acknowledgment
to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows;
and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country,
a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously
appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high
culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his
house.

In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head
was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a
thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners
were a pattern.

Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the
Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak.
I trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the
self-denial of a Brahmin.

As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.
She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin,
and no more mysterious than a window-pane. She had whimsical little
theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims
of Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old
duffer wasn't rather wise!

Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent
mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The
Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life-work. He was writing
a concordance to the Scriptures, and had arrived as far as Kings.
Bein