Above hung the great white stars in the blue-black Southern skies. The bay stretched glimmering and phosphorescent away from the palm-girt hotel gardens. The trade-winds set the myriad dry palm-fronds to rustling like the downpour of summer rain. Up the steps from the gardens drifted promenaders and dancers, in groups or in twos and threes. Then, up the stairway moved a slender, white-clad figure, alone. Claire Standish had sought to do as her brother had wished, and to forget, in the carefree life of the White City, the happenings she had been through. Dutifully she had come to Miami with him. Dutifully, for the past three days, she had joined him in such gayeties as he had suggested. Dutifully, to-night, she had come with him to this dance. And all the time her heart had been as heavy as lead. Now, getting rid of her partner on some pretext, she had gone out into the softly illumined gardens to be alone with the yearning and heartache she could not shake off. Then, fearing lest Milo, or some other of the men she knew, might come in search of her and wonder at her desire to mope alone under the stars, she had turned back to the hotel. As she mounted the last stair to the veranda, a man in dinner clothes stepped forward from one of the porch's great white pillars, and advanced to meet her. "There's a corner table at the Cafe de la Paix, in Paris," he greeted her, striving to control his voice and to speak lightly, "that every one on earth must pass by, sooner or later. The front veranda of the Royal Palm is like that. Soon or late, everybody crosses it. When I got back this afternoon, I heard you had left home and that you were somewhere in Miami. I couldn't find you. So I came here--and waited." Claire had halted, at first sound of Gavin Brice's pleasantly slow voice, and she stood facing him, wide-eyed and pale, her breath failing. "I had to go to Washington to make my report," said he, speaking low and fast. "I came back to you by the first train I could catch. Didn't you know I would?" "Yes," she breathed, her gaze still lost in his. "Yes. I--I knew." And now she realized she had known, even while she had told herself she would never see him again. "Come!" he said, gently, holding out his hand to her. Unashamed, under the battery of a hundred curious eyes, she clasped the proffered hand. And, together, they turned back toward the sheltering dimness of the gardens. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's Black Caesar's Clan, by Albert Payson Terhune