the renegade, then with a cynical laugh he rose.

"These little matters _are_ inconvenient," he admitted, "but
embarrassments beset one everywhere. If one turns aside to avoid his
old regiment, who knows but he may meet his tailor insistent upon
payment--or the lady who was once his wife?"

He lighted a cigarette, then with the refined cruelty that enjoyed
torturing a victim who could not afford to resent his brutality, he
added:

"But these army regulations are extremely annoying, I daresay--these
rules which proclaim it infamous to recognize one who--who has, under
certain circumstances, ceased to be a brother-officer."

The Englishman was leaning across the table, his cheek-bones red and his
eyes dangerous.

"By God, Jusseret, don't go too far!" he cautioned.

The Frenchman raised his hands in an apologetic gesture, but his eyes
still held a trace of the malevolent smile.

"A thousand pardons, my dear Martin," he begged. "I meant only to be
sympathetic."

CHAPTER XX

THE DEATH Of ROMANCE IS DEPLORED

"And yet," declared young Harcourt, "if there still survives, anywhere
in the world, a vestige of Romance, this should be her refuge; her last
stand against the encroachments of the commonplace."

He spoke animatedly, with the double eagerness of a boy and an artist,
sweeping one hand outward in an argumentative gesture. It was a gesture
which seemed to submit in evidence all the palpitating colors of Capri
sunning herself among her rocks: all the sparkle and glitter of the Bay
of Naples spreading away to the nebulous line where Ischia bulked
herself in mist against the horizon: all the majesty of the cone where
the fires of Vesuvius lay sleeping.

Across the table Sir Manuel Blanco shrugged his broad shoulders.

Benton lighted a cigarette, and a smile, scarcely indicative of frank
amusement, flickered in his eyes.

"Do you hold that Romance is on the run?" he queried.

"Where do you find it nowadays?" demanded the boy in flannels. "There!"
With the violence of disgust he slammed a Baedeker of Southern Italy
down upon the table. "That is the way we see the world in these days! We
go back with souvenir postcards instead of experiences, and when we get
home we have just been to a lot of tramped-over places. I'll wager that
a handful of this copper junk they call money over here, would buy in a
bull market all the real adventure any of us will ever know."

The three had been lunching out-doors i