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Merriam came back to life.

“Florence,” he said earnestly, “I want you. I don’t care what you’ve done. If the world–“

“Ralph,” she interrupted, almost with a scream, “be my world!”

Her eyes melted; she relaxed magnificently and swayed toward Merriam so suddenly that he had to jump to catch her.

Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. But it can’t be helped. It’s the subconscious smell of the footlights’ smoke that’s in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook’s soul sufficiently and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese.

Merriam and Mrs. Conant were very happy. He announced their engagement at the Hotel Orilla del Mar. Eight foreigners and four native Astors pounded his back and shouted insincere congratulations at him. Pedrito, the Castilian-mannered barkeep, was goaded to extra duty until his agility would have turned a Boston cherry-phosphate clerk a pale lilac with envy.

They were both very happy. According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker. They shut the world out and bolted the doors. Each was the other’s world. Mrs. Conant lived again. The remembering look left her eyes. Merriam was with her every moment that was possible. On a little plateau under a grove of palms and calabash trees they were going to build a fairy bungalow. They were to be married in two months. Many hours of the day they had their heads together over the house plans. Their joint capital would set up a business in fruit or woods that would yield a comfortable support. “Good night, my world,” would say Mrs. Conant every evening when Merriam left her for his hotel. They were very happy. Their love had, circumstantially, that element of melancholy in it that it seems to require to attain its supremest elevation. And it seemed that their mutual great misfortune or sin was a bond that nothing could sever.

One day a steamer hove in the offing. Bare-legged and bare-shouldered La Paz scampered down to the beach, for the arrival of a steamer was their loop-the-loop, circus, Emancipation Day and four-o’clock tea.

When the steamer was near enough, wise ones proclaimed that she was the Pajaro, bound up-coast from Callao to Panama.

The Pajaro put on brakes a mile off shore. Soon a boat came bobbing shoreward. Merriam strolled down on the beach to look on. In the shallow water the Carib sailors sprang out and dragged the boat with a mighty rush to the firm shingle. Out climbed the purser, the captain and two passengers, ploughing their way through the deep sand toward the hotel. Merriam glanced toward them with the mild interest due to strangers. There was something familiar to him in the walk of one of the passengers. He looked again, and his blood seemed to turn to strawberry ice cream in his veins. Burly, arrogant, debonair as ever, H. Ferguson Hedges, the man he had killed, was coming toward him ten feet away.

When Hedges saw Merriam his face flushed a dark red. Then he shouted in his old, bluff way: “Hello, Merriam. Glad to see you. Didn’t expect to find you out here. Quinby, this is my old friend Merriam, of New York–Merriam, Mr. Quinby.”

Merriam gave Hedges and then Quinby an ice-cold hand. “Br-r-r-r!” said Hedges. “But you’ve got a frapped flipper! Man, you’re not well. You’re as yellow as a Chinaman. Malarial here? Steer us to a bar if there is such a thing, and let’s take a prophylactic.”

Merriam, still half comatose, led them toward the Hotel Orilla del Mar.

“Quinby and I,” explained Hedges, puffing through the slippery sand, “are looking out along the coast for some investments. We’ve just come up from Concepcion and Valparaiso and Lima. The captain of this subsidized ferry boat told us there was some good picking around here in silver mines. So we got off. Now, where is that cafe, Merriam? Oh, in this portable soda water pavilion?”