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 her eye that she recognized in my voice the tones of her midnight mysterious wooer.

“Anyhow, I had Fergus McMahan going. Oh, the vocal is the true art—no doubt about that. Handsome is as handsome palavers. That’s the renovated proverb.

“I took Señorita Anabela for a walk in the lemon grove while Fergus, disfiguring himself with an ugly frown, was waltzing with the claybank girl. Before we returned I had permission to come to her window in the patio the next evening at midnight and talk some more.

“Oh, it was easy enough. In two weeks Anabela was engaged to me, and Fergus was out. He took it calm, for a handsome man, and told me he was n’t going to give in.

“‘Talk may be all right in its place, Judson,’ he says to me, ‘although I’ve never thought it worth cultivating. But,’ says he, ‘to expect mere words to back up successfully a face like yours in a lady’s good graces is like expecting a man to make a square meal on the ringing of a dinner-bell.’

“But I have n’t begun on the story I was going to tell you yet.

“One day I took a long ride in the hot sunshine, and then took a bath in the cold waters of a lagoon on the edge of the town before I’d cooled off.

“That evening after dark I called at the alcalde’s to see Anabela. I was calling regular every evening then, and we were to be married in a month. She was looking like a bulbul, a gazelle, and a tea-rose, and her eyes were as soft and bright as two quarts of cream skimmed off from the Milky Way. She looked at my rugged features without