"Perhaps it is poisonous," murmured Manuel, taking good care, however, to murmur in English.
"Oh, my dearest child! pray put it down," said Mrs. Thorne, anxiously.
"It is quite harmless," said the clergyman, "I know the family to which it belongs. It is not indigenous here; probably the original shrub was planted in the garden many years ago, and has run wild."
Garda took the stalk in her right hand, extended her left rigidly, and, stiffening her light figure in a wooden attitude, looked meekly upward.
"Bravo! bravo!" said the Doctor from his well-curb, laughing, and beginning on a second orange.
She stood thus for a few instants only. But it was very well done—an exact copy of a dark, grim old picture in the little Spanish cathedral of Gracias, a St. Catherine with a stalk of lilies in her hand.
Winthrop, who had returned, was standing on the other side of the open space. Apparently he had not noticed this little pantomime. Garda looked at him for a moment. Then she left her place, went across, and gravely decorated him with her stalk of blossoms, the large stem going through three of the button-holes of his coat before it could hold itself firmly; the brilliant flowers extended diagonally across his breast, past his chin, and above one ear.
"Your hat will break the top buds," said Garda, surveying her handiwork. "Please take it off."
He obeyed. "For what sacrifice am I thus adorned?" he asked.
"It's no sacrifice," answered Garda, "it's a rebellion—a rebellion against your constant objections to everything in the world!"
"But I haven't opened my lips."
"That is the very thing; you object silently—which is much worse. I'm not accustomed to people who object silently. Everybody here talks; why don't you talk?"
This little dialogue went on apart, the others could not hear it.
"I do—when you give me an opportunity," Winthrop answered.
"I'll give you one now," responded Garda; "we'll go back to the house, we'll go through the orange-walk as we came, and the others can follow as they came." Without waiting for reply, she went towards the garden gate. Winthrop followed her; and then Carlos Mateo, stalking across the open space, followed Winthrop. He followed him so closely that Winthrop declared he could feel his beak on his back. When they reached the house they paused; Carlos then took up his station a little apart, and stood on one leg to rest himself, watching Winthrop meanwhile with a suspicious eye.
Mrs. Thorne was crossing the level with the Rev. Mr. Moore. Following them, at a little distance, came Dr. Kirby, with his hands behind him. Manuel and Torres, forced to be companions a second time, formed the rear-guard of the returning procession. But as it approached the house, Manuel, raising his hat to Mrs. Thorne, turned away; he went down the live-oak avenue to the river landing, where his skiff was waiting. Manuel had his ideas, he did not care to be one of five. Torres, who also had his ideas, and many more of them than Manuel had, was not troubled by considerations of this sort; in his mind a Torres was never one of five, or one of anything, but always a Torres, and alone. Left to himself, he now took longer steps, passed the others, and came first to the doorway where Garda was standing.
"Why do you always look so serious, Mr. Torres?" she said, in Spanish, as he came up.
"It is of small consequence how I look, while the señorita herself remains so beautiful," answered the young man, bowing ceremoniously.
"Isn't that pretty?" said Garda to Winthrop.
"Immensely so," replied that decorated personage.
"But he does not look half so serious as you look comical—with all those brilliant flowers by the side of your immovable face," she went on, breaking into a laugh.
"It is of small consequence how I look, seeing that the señorita herself placed them where they are," answered Winthrop, in tolerable if rather labored Spanish, turning with a half-smile to Torres as he borrowed his phrase.
"You did not like it? You thought it childish?" said Garda. She drew the stalk quickly from its place. She was now speaking English, and Torres watched to see the fate of his gift; she had taken the flowers with the intention of throwing them away, but noticing that the Cuban's eyes were fixed upon them, she slipped the end of the stem under her belt, letting the long brilliant spray hang down over her dark skirt.
"I am now more honored than ever," said Winthrop.
"But it is Mr. Torres whom I am honoring this time," answered the girl.
Torres, hearing his name in her English sentence, drew the heels of his polished boots together with a little click, and made another low bow.
The rest of the party now came up, and soon after, the visitors took leave; Winthrop rode back across the pine-barrens to Gracias. Dr. Kirby bore him company on his stout black horse Osceola, glad indeed to be there and off his own feet; on the way he related a large portion of that history of the Spaniards in Florida which Garda, their descendant, had interrupted at the mill.
As they left East Angels, and rode out on the barren, this descendant was being addressed impressively by her mother. "That, Garda, is my idea of a cultivated gentleman: to have had such wide opportunities, and to have improved them; to be so agreeable, and yet so kind; so quiet, and yet so evidently a man of distinction, of mark—it's a rare combination."
"Very," replied Garda, giving the crane her gloves to carry in his beak.
They were still standing in the lower doorway; Mrs. Thorne surveyed her daughter for a moment, one of her states of uncertainty seemed to have seized her. "I hope you appreciate that Mr. Winthrop is not another Manuel or Torres," she said at last, in her most amiable tone.
"Perfectly, mamma; I could never make such a mistake as that. Mr. Winthrop inspires respect."
"He does—he does," said Mrs. Thorne, with conviction.
"I respect him already as a father," continued Garda. "Manuel and Ernesto also respect him as a father. Come, Carlos, my angel, let us go down to the landing, and see if we can call Manuel back."
CHAPTER III.
Gracias-á-Dios was a little town lying half asleep on the southern coast of the United States, under a sky of almost changeless blue.
Of almost changeless blue. Americans have long been, in a literary way, the vicarious victims, to a certain extent, of the climate of the British Isles. The low tones of the atmosphere of those islands, the shifting veils of fog and rain rising and falling over them, the soft gray light filtered through mist and cloud—all these have caused the blue skies and endless sunshine of Italy to seem divinely fair to visitors from English shores; and as among these visitors have come the poets and the romance writers, this fairness, embalmed in prose and verse, has taken its place in literature, has become classic. The imaginative New World student, eager to learn, passionately desirous to appreciate, has read these pages reverently; he knows them by heart. And when at last the longed-for day comes when