knees. He rubbed his silvery, short
hair with both hands, speechless with the excess of joy.
    »Emilia, my soul,« he had burst out, »let me embrace you! Let me -«
    Captain Mitchell, had he been there, would no doubt have made an apt remark
about the dawn of a new era; but if Don José thought something of the kind, his
eloquence failed him on this occasion. The inspirer of that revival of the
Blanco party tottered where he stood. Mrs. Gould moved forward quickly and, as
she offered her cheek with a smile to her old friend, managed very cleverly to
give him the support of her arm he really needed.
    Don José had recovered himself at once, but for a time he could do no more
than murmur, »Oh, you two patriots! Oh, you two patriots!« - looking from one to
the other. Vague plans of another historical work, wherein all the devotions to
the regeneration of the country he loved would be enshrined for the reverent
worship of posterity, flitted through his mind. The historian who had enough
elevation of soul to write of Guzman Bento: »Yet this monster, imbrued in the
blood of his countrymen, must not be held unreservedly to the execration of
future years. It appears to be true that he, too, loved his country. He had
given it twelve years of peace; and, absolute master of lives and fortunes as he
was, he died poor. His worst fault, perhaps, was not his ferocity, but his
ignorance;« the man who could write thus of a cruel persecutor (the passage
occurs in his »History of Misrule«) felt at the foreshadowing of success an
almost boundless affection for his two helpers, for these two young people from
over the sea.
    Just as years ago, calmly, from the conviction of practical necessity,
stronger than any abstract political doctrine, Henry Gould had drawn the sword,
so now, the times being changed, Charles Gould had flung the silver of the San
Tomé into the fray. The Inglez of Sulaco, the Costaguana Englishman of the third
generation, was as far from being a political intriguer as his uncle from a
revolutionary swashbuckler. Springing from the instinctive uprightness of their
natures their action was reasoned. They saw an opportunity and used the weapon
to hand.
    Charles Gould's position - a commanding position in the background of that
attempt to retrieve the peace and the credit of the Republic - was very clear.
At the beginning he had had to accommodate himself to existing circumstances of
corruption so naïvely