Holcombe did not speak, but put his arm across the other’s shoulder, and this time Carroll did not shake it off.  Holcombe pointed with his hand to a tall, handsome woman with heavy yellow hair who was coming toward them, with her hands in the pockets of her reefer.  “There is Mrs. Carroll now,” he said.  “Won’t you present me, and then we can row out and see the man-of-war?”

II

The officers returned their visit during the day, and the American Consul-General asked them all to a reception the following afternoon.  The entire colony came to this, and Holcombe met many people, and drank tea with several ladies in riding-habits, and iced drinks with all of the men.  He found it very amusing, and the situation appealed strongly to his somewhat latent sense of humor.  That evening in writing to his sister he told of his rapid recovery in health, and of the possibility of his returning to civilization.

“There was a reception this afternoon at the Consul-General’s,” he wrote, “given to the officers of our man-of-war, and I found myself in some rather remarkable company.  The Consul himself has become rich by selling his protection for two hundred dollars to every wealthy Moor who wishes to escape the forced loans which the Sultan is in the habit of imposing on the faithful.  For five hundred dollars he will furnish any one of them with a piece of stamped paper accrediting him as minister plenipotentiary from the United States to the Sultan’s court.  Of course the Sultan never receives them, and whatever object they may have had in taking the long journey to Fez is never accomplished.  Some day some one of them will find out how he has been tricked, and will return to have the Consul assassinated.  This will be a serious loss to our diplomatic service.  The Consul’s wife is a fat German woman who formerly kept a hotel here.  Her brother has it now, and runs it as an annex to a gambling-house.  Pat Meakim, the Police Commissioner that I indicted, but who jumped his bail, introduced me at the reception to the men, with apparently great self-satisfaction, as ’the pride of the New York Bar,’ and Mrs. Carroll, for whose husband I obtained a divorce, showed her gratitude by presenting me to the ladies.  It was a distinctly Gilbertian situation, and the people to whom they introduced me were quite as picturesquely disreputable as themselves.  So you see—­”

Holcombe stopped here and read over what he had written, and then tore up the letter.  The one he sent in its place said he was getting better, but that the climate was not so mild as he had expected it would be.