lit up the circle and the tips of the palms above them, and when the
story-teller's voice was accompanied by bursts of occasional laughter
from the dragomen in the grove beyond, and the stamping and neighing
of the horses at their pickets, and the unceasing chorus of the insect
life about them. She used to sit on one of the rugs with her hands
clasped about her knees, and with her head resting on Mrs. Hornby's
broad shoulder, looking down into the embers of the fire, and with the
story of her life written on her girl's face as irrevocably as though
old age had set its seal there. Holcombe was kind to them all now,
even to Meakim, when that gentleman rode leisurely out to the camp
with the mail and the latest Paris _Herald_, which was their one
bond of union with the great outside world.

Carroll sat smoking his pipe one night, and bending forward over the
fire to get its light on the pages of the latest copy of this paper.
Suddenly he dropped it between his knees. "I say, Holcombe," he cried,
"here's news! Winthrop Allen has absconded with three hundred thousand
dollars, and no one knows where."

Holcombe was sitting on the other side of the fire, prying at the
rowel of his spur with a hunting-knife. He raised his head and
laughed. "Another good man gone wrong, hey?" he said.

Carroll lowered the paper slowly to his knee and stared curiously
through the smoky light to where Holcombe sat intent on the rowel of
his spur. It apparently absorbed his entire attention, and his last
remark had been an unconsciously natural one. Carroll smiled grimly as
he folded the paper across his knee. "Now are the mighty fallen,
indeed," he murmured. He told Meakim of it a few minutes later, and
they both marvelled. "It's just as I told him, isn't it, and he