The candles on the dinner table jarred at the peals of thunder; but Lawrence Teck sat impassive. Toward the end of the meal he vouchsafed:
"Have you reported my showing up?"
"I was going to put it on the wire to-morrow morning."
"If it could be arranged I should like to precede the news to America."
The commandant, without knowing why, felt a touch of alarm.
"Then I'll send my report direct to the governor, and mark it confidential at your request."
That night the commandant, lying under his mosquito net, wakeful from prickly heat, was haunted by the face of Lawrence Teck. "She must be very beautiful," he sighed. "Why didn't they print her picture?" And he occupied himself with trying to imagine what she looked like.
By the time he was falling asleep he had decided that she must have yellow hair and large, blue eyes. Just as he dozed off he had a ravishing impression of her—a composite of an Austrian arch-duchess, whose likeness he had admired in a periodical, and a Neapolitan singer who had overwhelmed him in a music hall at home, long ago, when the world had seemed a place stored with love, fame, and wealth, instead of with prickly heat, malaria, and shiny, black faces.
"My angel!" breathed the poor commandant of Fort Pero d'Anhaya, sleeping for the first time in many a night with an infantile smile on his countenance that suggested a half-deflated balloon.