n't anything he did, it was Lucian himself.
Besides, I liked so much to look at him--he was so beautiful. Don't you
remember the dimple that came when he threw back his head and laughed?"
She moved a little so that she could rest her chin on her clasped hands,
and look up into Winthrop's face; her eyes met his dreamily; she saw
him, but she was thinking of Spenser.

"Torres has a dimple too," answered Winthrop, rather desperately. For
between the beauty of the girl herself, made more appealing as it was
now by her sorrow, her confiding trust that he was prepared to play on
demand the part of grandfather or uncle--between this and her
extraordinary, frank dwelling upon the attractive points of Lucian
Spenser, together with the wrath he felt against that accomplished young
engineer--he was not, perhaps, so fully in possession of his accustomed
calmness as usual. But she was a child, of course; he always came back
to that; she was nothing but a child.

It was true that poor Torres had a dimple, as Winthrop had said. It was
in his lean dark cheek, and everybody was astonished to see it there;
once there, everybody wondered where it found space to play. It did not
find it in depth, and had to spread itself laterally; it was a very thin
dimple on a bone.

But Garda paid no attention to this attempt at a diversion. "Did you
ever see such eyes as Lucian's, such a deep, deep blue?" she demanded of
Winthrop's gray ones.

"Very blue," he answered. He was succeeding in keeping all expression
out of his face (if there had been any, it would not have been of the
pleasantest). He felt, however, that his tone was dry.

But acquiescence was enough for Garda, she did not notice his tone; she
continued the expression of her recollections. "When the light shone
across his hair--don't you remember the color? It was like real gold. He
looked then like--like a sun-god," she concluded, bringing out the word
with ardor.

"What do you know of sun-gods?" said Winthrop, endeavoring to bear
himself agreeably in these intimate confidences. "How many of the
warm-complexioned gentlemen have you known?"

"I mean the Kirbys' picture," answered Garda, with much definiteness,
rejecting sun-gods in general as a topic, as she had the dimple of poor
Torres; "you must remember the one I mean."

Winthrop did remember; it was a copy of the Phoebus Apollo of Guido's
"Aurora" at Rome.

"Oh," continued Garda, without waiting for reply, "what a comfort i