re to continue good friends, Mr. Clay," said Miss Langham, in
decisive tones, "we must keep our relationship on more of a social and
less of a personal basis. It was all very well that first night I met
you," she went on, in a kindly tone.

"You rushed in then and by a sort of tour de force made me think a
great deal about myself and also about you. Your stories of cherished
photographs and distant devotion and all that were very interesting;
but now we are to be together a great deal, and if we are to talk about
ourselves all the time, I for one shall grow very tired of it. As a
matter of fact you don't know what your feelings are concerning me, and
until you do we will talk less about them and more about the things you
are certain of. When are you going to take us to the mines, for
instance, and who was Anduella, the Liberator of Olancho, on that
pedestal over there? Now, isn't that much more instructive?"

Clay smiled grimly and made no answer, but sat with knitted brows
looking out across the trees of the plaza. His face was so serious and
he was apparently giving such earnest consideration to what she had
said that Miss Langham felt an uneasy sense of remorse. And, moreover,
the young man's profile, as he sat looking away from her, was very
fine, and the head on his broad shoulders was as well-modelled as the
head of an Athenian statue.

Miss Langham was not insensible to beauty of any sort, and she regarded
the profile with perplexity and with a softening spirit.

"You understand," she said, gently, being quite certain that she did
not understand this new order of young man herself. "You are not
offended with me?" she asked.

Clay turned and frowned, and then smiled in a puzzled way and stretched
out his hand toward the equestrian statue in the plaza.

"Andulla or Anduella, the Treaty-Maker, as they call him, was born in
1700," he said; "he was a most picturesque sort of a chap, and freed
this country from the yoke of Spain. One of the stories they tell of
him gives you a good idea of his character." And so, without any
change of expression or reference to what had just passed between them,
Clay continued through the remainder of their stay on the balcony to
discourse in humorous, graphic phrases on the history of Olancho, its
heroes, and its revolutions, the buccaneers and pirates of the old
days, and the concession-hunters and filibusters of the present. It
was some time before Miss Langham was ab