aimed Dick, delightedly. "I
never saw such dimples as she's got."

"Or else you've forgotten the others. Well, I walked slowly so as not to
break up the picture. She had on a thin veil, so I thought maybe she
wouldn't be as pretty or young without it, but it was like a pearly mist
with the sun shining on it, and it gave her that kind of mysterious,
magic beauty of things half seen which stirs up all the romance in you."

"Don't I know?" Dick muttered. "But she's always got that, with or
without a veil. It's a peculiar quality of her features or her
expression--I don't know which--that can't be described exactly, any
more than the lights on the clouds can, that I see sometimes when I've
got up a few hundred feet high in the sunrise. I wouldn't have said all
this about her if you hadn't begun. But anybody must feel it."

"I believe the beggars did, without knowing it. I did--even I, a woman.
I felt I must see if she'd be as pretty when she lifted her veil to eat
the chestnut, so I stopped not far off, on the Monaco end of the bridge,
and pretended to tie up my shoe-string. I thought I'd never seen a face
like hers--not at all modern, somehow. Who is it says romance is the
quality of _strangeness_ in beauty? Hers has that. It seemed to me when
she got her veil up that she was more wonderful, not belonging to any
century in particular, but to all time, as if thousands of lovely
ancestresses had given her something of themselves as a talisman."

"Rose, what a darling you are!" Dick said, seizing her hands and
squeezing them hard.

"Oh," she laughed, wincing a little. "You couldn't do that to _her_ with
all her rings. I was just trying to _draw_ you! Now I've found out all I
want to know. You're dreadfully, frightfully in love with Miss Grant."

"Am I?" he asked. "Perhaps. I'm not sure. Only I see that there's
something rare about her, and she's too precious to be living as she
does, surrounded by a weird gang who all want to get something out of
her, or else to give her something she oughtn't to take. Like that
Indian chap, the Maharajah of Indorwana--confound the little beast! He's
tried to make her take a diamond star and a rope of pearls."

"I suppose she needn't, unless she wants to."

"Oh, I don't know, she's so good-natured, and somehow childlike. She had
both the things on at the Casino last night; said he insisted on lending
them to her, for luck, and she didn't like refusing them, as he almost
cried. And the