He praised everybody but himself; he praised Clara, Thurstane, and the two soldiers and the horses; he even said a flattering word or two for Divine Providence.

Clara especially, and the whole of her heroic, more than human sex, demanded his enthusiastic admiration.

How she had borne the terrors of the night and the desert! "Ah, Mrs.Stanley! only you women are capable of such efforts." Aunt Maria's Olympian head nodded, and her cheerful face, glowing with tea and the camp fires, confessed "Certainly!" "What nonsense, Coronado!" said Clara.

"I was horribly frightened, and you know it." Aunt Maria frowned with surprise and denial.

"Absurd, child! You were not frightened at all.