in the habit of taking his women-folks on his voyages with him. "Skirts
clutter up the deck too much," was his opinion.

He had taken Jane, however, not only on this voyage, but on that
preceding it, which had been to Rio. It was Captain Lote's belief,
and his wife's hope, that a succession of sea winds might blow away
recollections of Senor Speranza--"fan the garlic out of her head," as
the captain inelegantly expressed it. Jane had spent her sixteenth and
seventeenth years at a school for girls near Boston. The opera company
of which Speranza was a member was performing at one of the
minor theaters. A party of the school girls, duly chaperoned and
faculty-guarded, of course, attended a series of matinees. At these
matinees Jane first saw her hero, brave in doublet and hose, and braver
still in melody and romance. She and her mates looked and listened
and worshiped from afar, as is the habit of maidenly youth under such
circumstances. There is no particular danger in such worship provided
the worshiper remains always at a safely remote distance from the idol.
But in Jane's case this safety-bar was removed by Fate. The wife of a
friend of her father's, the friend being a Boston merchant named Cole
with whom Captain Zelotes had had business dealings for many years, was
a music lover. She was in the habit of giving what she was pleased to
call "musical teas" at her home. Jane, to whom Mr. and Mrs. Cole had
taken a marked fancy, was often invited to those teas and, because the
Coles were "among our nicest people," she was permitted by the school
authorities to attend.

At one of those teas Senor Miguel Carlos Speranza was the brightest
star. The Senor, then in his twenty-ninth year, handsome, talented and
picturesque, shone refulgent. Other and far more experienced feminine
hearts than Jane Snow's were flutteringly disturbed by the glory of