toria swept again to the door of the hotel, deposited White,
and vanished. The artist dashed up the stairs, three at a step. Keogh
stopped smoking, and became a silent interrogation point.

"Landed," exclaimed White, with his boyish face flushed with elation.
"Billy, you are a wonder. He wants a picture. I'll tell you all about
it. By Heavens! that dictator chap is a corker! He's a dictator clear
down to his finger-ends. He's a kind of combination of Julius Caesar,
Lucifer and Chauncey Depew done in sepia. Polite and grim--that's his
way. The room I saw him in was about ten acres big, and looked like
a Mississippi steamboat with its gilding and mirrors and white paint.
He talks English better than I can ever hope to. The matter of the
price came up. I mentioned ten thousand. I expected him to call the
guard and have me taken out and shot. He didn't move an eyelash. He
just waved one of his chestnut hands in a careless way, and said,
'Whatever you say.' I am to go back to-morrow and discuss with him
the details of the picture."

Keogh hung his head. Self-abasement was easy to read in his downcast
countenance.

"I'm failing, Carry," he said, sorrowfully. "I'm not fit to handle
these man's-size schemes any longer. Peddling oranges in a push-cart
is about the suitable graft for me. When I said ten thousand, I
swear I thought I had sized up that brown man's limit to within
two cents. He'd have melted down for fifteen thousand just as easy.
Say--Carry--you'll see old man Keogh safe in some nice, quiet idiot
asylum, won't you, if he makes a break like that again?"

The Casa Morena, although only one story in height, was a building of
brown stone, luxurious as a palace in its interior. It stood on a low
hill in a walled garden of splendid tropical flora at the upper edge
of Coralio. The next day the president's carriage came again for the
artist. Keogh went out for a walk along the beach, where he and his
"picture box" were now familiar sights. When he returned to the hotel
White was sitting in a steamer-chair on the balcony.

"Well," said Keogh, "did you and His Nibs decide on the kind of a
chromo he wants?"

White got up and walked back and forth on the balcony a few times.
Then he stopped, and laughed strangely. His face was flushed, and his
eyes were bright with a kind of angry amusement.

"Look here, Billy," he said, somewhat roughly, "when you first came
to me in my studio and mentioned a picture, I thought you wa