flowers, stepped swiftly
back again to the lounge and heaped them upon it.

"Come, for God's sake, come!" Clay called to her in a whisper from the
door.

Hope stood for an instant staring at the young Englishman as the
candle-light flickered over his white face, and then, dropping on her
knees, she pushed back the curly hair from about the boy's forehead and
kissed him. Then, without turning to look again, she placed her hand
in Clay's and he ran with her, dragging her behind him down the length
of the hall, just as the mob entered it on the floor below them and
filled the palace with their shouts of triumph.

As the sun sank lower its light fell more dimly on the lonely figure in
the vast dining-hall, and as the gloom deepened there, the candles
burned with greater brilliancy, and the faces of the portraits shone
more clearly.

They seemed to be staring down less sternly now upon the white mortal
face of the brother-in-arms who had just joined them.

One who had known him among his own people would have seen in the
attitude and in the profile of the English soldier a likeness to his
ancestors of the Crusades who lay carved in stone in the village
church, with their faces turned to the sky, their faithful hounds
waiting at their feet, and their hands pressed upward in prayer.

And when, a moment later, the half-crazed mob of men and boys swept
into the great room, with Mendoza at their head, something of the
pathos of the young Englishman's death in his foreign place of exile
must have touched them, for they stopped appalled and startled, and
pressed back upon their fellows, with eager whispers. The
Spanish-American General strode boldly forward, but his eyes lowered
before the calm, white face, and either because the lighted candles and
the flowers awoke in him some memory of the great Church that had
nursed him, or because the jagged holes in the soldier's tunic appealed
to what was bravest in him, he crossed himself quickly, and then
raising his hands slowly to his visor, lifted his hat and pointed with
it to the door. And the mob, without once looking back at the rich
treasure of silver on the table, pushed out before him, stepping
softly, as though they had intruded on a shrine.

XIII

The President's travelling carriage was a double-seated diligence
covered with heavy hoods and with places on the box for two men. Only
one of the coachmen, the same man who had driven the State carriage
from the r