conscious Stuart, ``he naturally would leave that out.''

Mr. Langham and his daughters formed an eager audience. They had
never before met at one table three men who had known such
experiences, and who spoke of them as though they must be as
familiar in the lives of the others as in their own--men who
spoiled in the telling stories that would have furnished
incidents for melodramas, and who impressed their hearers more
with what they left unsaid, and what was only suggested, than
what in their view was the most important point.

The dinner came to an end at last, and Mr. Langham proposed that
they should go down and walk with the people in the plaza; but
his two daughters preferred to remain as spectators on the
balcony, and Clay and Stuart stayed with them.

``At last!'' sighed Clay, under his breath, seating himself at
Miss Langham's side as she sat leaning forward with her arms upon
the railing and looking down into the plaza below. She made no
sign at first that she had heard him, but as the voices of Stuart
and Hope rose from the other end of the balcony she turned her
head and asked, ``Why at last?''

``Oh, you couldn't understand,'' laughed Clay. ``You have not
been looking forward to just one thing and then had it come true.
It is the only thing that ever did come true to me, and I thought
it never would.''

``You don't try to make me understand,'' said the girl,
smiling, but without turning her eyes from the moving spectacle