ly summoned Perkins
to its assistance! And it was there he believed himself secure!
What security had he at all? Might not this strange, unimpassioned,
omniscient man already know HIS secret as he had known the others'?

The interview of Perkins with the messenger in the next cabin was a long
one, and apparently a stormy one on the part of the newcomer. Hurlstone
could hear his excited foreign voice, shrill with the small vehemence of
a shallow character; but there was no change in the slow, measured tones
of the Senor. He listlessly began to turn over the papers on the table.
Presently he paused. He had taken up a sheet of paper on which Senor
Perkins had evidently been essaying some composition in verse. It seemed
to have been of a lugubrious character. The titular line at the top
of the page, "Dirge," had been crossed out for the substituted "In
Memoriam." He read carelessly:

"O Muse unmet--but not unwept--
I seek thy sacred haunt in vain.
Too late, alas! the tryst is kept--
We may not meet again!

"I sought thee 'midst the orange bloom,
To find that thou hadst grasped the palm
Of martyr, and the silent tomb
Had hid thee in its calm.

"By fever racked, thou languishest
On Nicaragua's"--

Hurlstone threw the paper aside. Although he had not forgotten the
Senor's reputation for sentimental extravagance, and on another occasion
might have laughed at it, there was something so monstrous in
this hysterical, morbid composition of the man who was even then
contemplating bloodshed and crime, that he was disgusted. Like most
sentimental egotists, Hurlstone was exceedingly intolerant of that
quality in others, and he turned for relief to his own thoughts of
Eleanor Keene and his own unfortunate passion. HE could not have written
poetry at such a moment!

But the cabin-door opened, and Senor Perkins appeared. Whatever might
have been the excited condition of his unknown visitor, the Senor's
round, clean-shaven face was smiling and undisturbed by emotion. As
his eye fell on the page of manuscript Hurlstone had just cast down, a
slight shadow crossed his beneficent expanse of forehead, and deepened
in his soft dark eyes; but the next moment it was chased away by his
quick recurring smile. Even thus transient and superficial was his
feeling, thought Hurlstone.

"I have some news for you," said Perkins affably, "which may alter your
decision about returning. M