ments, had that of speaking Spanish.

Whether he told or not, the young Cuban at any rate appeared among them
again. He was tired, possibly, of the consumption of his soul. But there
was this advantage about Torres, that though he might consume his own,
he had no desire to consume the soul (or body either) of any one else;
whereas Manuel appeared to cherish this wish to an absolutely sanguinary
degree. The dislike he had had for Evert Winthrop was nothing compared
with the rage with which he now regarded Lucian Spenser. To tell the
truth, Lucian trespassed upon his own ground: if Manuel was handsome,
Lucian was handsomer still. "A finer-looking young man than Lucian
Spenser," Mrs. Rutherford had more than once remarked, "is _very_ seldom
seen." And Kate Rutherford was a judge.

Lucian having no horse, as Winthrop had, could not, as Garda expressed
it, ride over the pine barrens in every direction and stop at East
Angels; but he had a fisherman's black boat, with ragged sail, and
though it was not an _Emperadora_, it could still float down the
Espiritu with sufficient swiftness, giving its occupant an opportunity
to stop at the same old Spanish residence, where there was a convenient
water-landing as well as an entrance from the barrens. The occupant
stopped so often, and his manner when he did stop was so different from
that of their other visitors, that Mrs. Thorne felt at last that duty
demanded that she should "make inquiries." This duty had never been
esteemed one of the principal ones of life at Gracias-a-Dios; Mrs.
Thorne's determination, therefore, showed that her original New England
maxims were alive somewhere down in her composition still (as Betty
Carew had always declared that they were), in spite of the layer upon
layer of Thorne and Duero traditions with which she had carefully
overlaid them. She was aware that it was a great inconsistency on her
part to revert, at this late day, to the methods of her youth. But what
could she do? The Thornes and Dueros were dead, and had left no
precedents for a case like this; and Lucian Spenser was alive
(particularly so), and with Garda almost all the time.

"She asked me," said the Rev. Mr. Moore to his wife, "what I knew, that
was 'definite,' about Lucian, which seemed to me, Penelope, a very
singular question, Lucian being so near and dear a relative of ours. I
did not, however, comment upon this; I simply gave her a full account of
the Spenser family, or rather o