“All the same,” remarked his other friend, “I don’t think I’d—ar—put very long odds on you, old chappie. There’s nothing certain in this life, and widows are apt—ar—to keep a fellow dangling till a fellow gets tired. Finished? Then let’s go to the bar and throw for liqueurs. Mine’s _crême de menthe_.” CHAPTER XX. AT POINT SEBASTIAN. Now the great rambling, wooden hotel in which Miss Elsie Kildare was staying under care of her friends, the Van Liews, though on the end of a telegraph-wire, and within easy day’s steam of a railroad, was not particularly far in crow’s-flight from that uncharted river where the _Port Edes_ lay stranded on a sand-bar. The hotel, in fact, backed upon the Everglades, and faced the blue, crisping waters of the Mexican Gulf. At one side of it was a plantation of sisal hemp, and beyond that thickets of saw-grass, and beyond again cypress-trees and cabbage-palms sprouting from an undergrowth which was bound into an impenetrable _cheveux de frise_ with wait-a-bit thorn. At the other side were newly planted umbrella-trees, two decrepit orange-bushes without fruit, twenty luxuriant chumps of elephants’ ears, and then straggles of palmetto-scrub right down to the soft white banks of Gulf sand. Beyond was clear blue water, with a rickety wooden wharf straddling a mile out into it, like some uncouth, gray-legged centipede. And beneath the water, dented rusty food-cans grew intimate with the coral polyp. In winter time, Point Sebastian was a resting-place for nabobs of the north, and a congregation spot for those delightful American women who leave a convenient husband at work elsewhere on the dollar-mill. But, in the warmer months, these worthy people did their pleasure-living at the sea beaches of the north, or the hotels of the Alleghanies; and the rest-house at Point Sebastian locked and covered most of its glories. The Floridan who stays in Florida all summer does so usually because of a tightness in the exchequer; and for the few of him who came to dissipate a small but hardly scraped-up hoard in a spell of semi-civilization, a tenth of the available rooms made ample lodging place. Still there was a summer season of sorts at Point Sebastian, which was merry enough in its way. Most nights, on the parquet of the hall, a cheery score danced under the glare of electric lights to the lilt of Teuton fiddles; and in the cool gloom of the piazzas outside, if straitened means did prevent the actual drafting of marriage contracts, even penury undisguised could enjoy the dallyings of the week’s flirtation. Mr. Kent-Williams and his tribe were entertaining fellows enough to meet for a limited time, and maidens, come into the hotel for an annual outing, basked in the odor of their pretty sayings, and frankly prepared themselves for nothing beyond temporary amusement.