They found the two boys waiting in the cafe' of the restaurant
where they had arranged to meet, and they ascended the steps
together to the table on the balcony that Clay had reserved for
them.

The young engineer appeared at his best as host. The
responsibility of seeing that a half-dozen others were amused and
content sat well upon him; and as course followed course, and
the wines changed, and the candles left the rest of the room
in darkness and showed only the table and the faces around it,
they all became rapidly more merry and the conversation
intimately familiar.

Clay knew the kind of table-talk to which the Langhams were
accustomed, and used the material around his table in such a way
that the talk there was vastly different. From King he drew
forth tales of the buried cities he had first explored, and then
robbed of their ugliest idols. He urged MacWilliams to tell
carefully edited stories of life along the Chagres before the
Scandal came, and of the fastnesses of the Andes; and even Stuart
grew braver and remembered ``something of the same sort'' he had
seen at Fort Nilt, in Upper Burma.

``Of course,'' was Clay's comment at the conclusion of one of
these narratives, ``being an Englishman, Stuart left out the
point of the story, which was that he blew in the gates of the
fort with a charge of dynamite. He got a D. S. O. for doing
it.''

``Being an Englishman,'' said Hope, smiling encouragingly on the