"Oh, how can you?" cried Hope. "You didn't do anything of the sort. You probably saved the entire regiment."
"Well, perhaps I did," Clay returned. "Though I don't remember it, and nobody mentioned it at the time."
"Go on about the others," said Hope. "And do try to be truthful."
"Well, I got this one from Spain, because I was President of an International Congress of Engineers at Madrid. That was the ostensible reason, but the real reason was because I taught the Spanish Commissioners to play poker instead of baccarat. The German Emperor gave me this for designing a fort, and the Sultan of Zanzibar gave me this, and no one but the Sultan knows why, and he won't tell. I suppose he's ashamed. He gives them away instead of cigars. He was out of cigars the day I called."
"What a lot of places you have seen," sighed Hope. "I have been in Cairo and Algiers, too, but I always had to walk about with a governess, and she wouldn't go to the mosques because she said they were full of fleas. We always go to Homburg and Paris in the summer, and to big hotels in London. I love to travel, but I don't love to travel that way, would you?"
"I travel because I have no home," said Clay. "I'm different from the chap that came home because all the other places were shut. I go to other places because there is no home open."
"What do you mean?" said Hope, shaking her head. "Why have you no home?"
"There was a ranch in Colorado that I used to call home," said Clay, "but they've cut it up into town lots. I own a plot in the cemetery outside of the town, where my mother is buried, and I visit that whenever I am in the States, and that is the only piece of earth anywhere in the world that I have to go back to."
Hope leaned forward with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes wide open.
"And your father?" she said, softly; "is he--is he there, too--"
Clay looked at the lighted end of his cigar as he turned it between his fingers.
"My father, Miss Hope," he said, "was a filibuster, and went out on the 'Virginius' to help free Cuba, and was shot, against a stone wall. We never knew where he was buried."
"Oh, forgive me; I beg your pardon," said Hope. There was such distress in her voice that Clay looked at her quickly and saw the tears in her eyes. She reached out her hand timidly, and touched for an instant his own rough, sunburned fist, as it lay clenched on his knee. "I am so sorry," she said, "so sorry." For the first time in many years the tears came to Clay's eyes and blurred the moonlight and the scene before him, and he sat unmanned and silent before the simple touch of a young girl's sympathy.