the _svelte_ figure
of a woman whose southern beauty outshone Lesbia's blonde English
loveliness as the tropical stars outshine the lamps that light our
colder skies. Yes, every detail of the scene flashed back into his mind,
as if a curtain had been suddenly plucked back from a long-hidden
picture. The Cuban's tall slim figure, the head gently bent towards his
partner's head, as at this moment, and those dark eyes looking up at
him, intoxicated with that nameless, indefinable fascination which it is
the lot of some men to exercise.

'He robbed me of _her_!' thought Smithson, gloomily. 'Will he rob me of
this one too? Surely not! Havana is Havana--and this one is not a
Creole. If I cannot trust that lovely piece of marble, there is no woman
on earth to be trusted.'

He turned his back upon the dancers, and went out into the garden. His
soul was wrung with jealousy, yet he could watch no longer. There was
too much pain--there were too many bitter memories of shame, and loss,
and ignominy evoked by that infernal picture. If he had been free he
would have asserted his authority as Lesbia's future husband; he would
have taken her away from the Orleans; he would have told her plainly and
frankly that Don Gomez was no fit person for her to know; and he would
have so planned that they two should never meet again. But Horace
Smithson was not free. He was bound hand and foot by those fetters which
the chain of past events had forged--stern facts which the man himself
may forget, or try to forget, but which other people never forget. There
is generally some dark spot in the history of such men as Smithson--men
who climb the giddiest heights of this world with that desperate
rapidity which implies many a perilous leap from crag to crag, many a
moraine skimmed over, and many an awful gulf spanned by a hair-breadth
bridge. Mr. Smithson's history was not without such spots; and the
darkest of all had relation to his career in Cuba. The story had been
known by very few--perhaps completely known only by one man; and that
man was Gomez de Montesma.

For the last fifteen years the most fervent desire of Horace Smithson's
heart had been the hope that tropical nature, in any one of her various
disagreeable forms, would be obliging enough to make an end of Gomez.
But the forces of nature had not worked on Mr. Smithson's side. No
loathsome leprosy had eaten his enemy's flesh; neither cayman nor
crocodile, neither Juba snake nor poisonous