sitting in
your club you'll read a paragraph in a newspaper with a queer Spanish
date-line to it, and this will all come back to you,--this heat, and
the palms, and the fever, and the days when you lived on plantains and
we watched our trestles grow out across the canons, and you'll be
willing to give your hand to sleep in a hammock again, and to feel the
sweat running down your back, and you'll want to chuck your gun up
against your chin and shoot into a line of men, and the policemen won't
let you, and your wife won't let you. That's what you're giving up.
There it is. Take a good look at it. You'll never see it again."

XV

The steamer "Santiago," carrying "passengers, bullion, and coffee," was
headed to pass Porto Rico by midnight, when she would be free of land
until she anchored at the quarantine station of the green hills of
Staten Island. She had not yet shaken off the contamination of the
earth; a soft inland breeze still tantalized her with odors of tree and
soil, the smell of the fresh coat of paint that had followed her
coaling rose from her sides, and the odor of spilt coffee-grains that
hung around the hatches had yet to be blown away by a jealous ocean
breeze, or washed by a welcoming cross sea.

The captain stopped at the open entrance of the Social Hall. "If any of
you ladies want to take your last look at Olancho you've got to come
now," he said. "We'll lose the Valencia light in the next quarter
hour."

Miss Langham and King looked up from their novels and smiled, and Miss
Langham shook her head. "I've taken three final farewells of Olancho
already," she said: "before we went down to dinner, and when the sun
set, and when the moon rose. I have no more sentiment left to draw on.
Do you want to go?" she asked.

"I'm very comfortable, thank you," King said, and returned to the
consideration of his novel.

But Clay and Hope arose at the captain's suggestion with suspicious
alacrity, and stepped out upon the empty deck, and into the
encompassing darkness, with a little sigh of relief.

Alice Langham looked after them somewhat wistfully and bit the edges of
her book. She sat for some time with her brows knitted, glancing
occasionally and critically toward King and up with unseeing eyes at
the swinging lamps of the saloon. He caught her looking at him once
when he raised his eyes as he turned a page, and smiled back at her,
and she nodded pleasantly and bent her head over her reading.