o Mrs. Spenser's
mind the thought that she had perhaps been speaking acrimoniously. She
did not mean to be acrimonious; but she was not a southerner, as Lucian
was, by birth at least, and he was making a great deal of this southern
origin of his whenever he was with Garda Thorne. He was with her every
day; true, his wife was present, and other persons; and Garda herself
was engaged to Mrs. Rutherford's nephew, Evert Winthrop, who had gone
north for three weeks or so on business just before they came. But there
might be fifty wives and five hundred other persons present, poor
Rosalie thought, Lucian would look at that beautiful girl and talk to
that beautiful girl, engaged or not engaged, whenever he pleased. She
accused him in her heart of not having told her that there was any such
person in Gracias. But the truth was (and she knew it) that, as she had
never been able to respond with sympathy to allusions on his part to
such acquaintances, much less to any recitals concerning them, he had
learned (as he had not a grain of malice) not to make them. As for
Gracias, she herself had proposed their coming there; she had not cared
to spend the winter in New York or Washington, and see her husband
cajoled by society; she had never loved society, and now she hated it;
Lucian's content was not in the least dependent upon it, fortunately. He
had described this little Florida town to her with a good deal of
amusing decoration, she had thought that she should like to see it for
herself; in her painstaking, devoted way she had studied the sketches he
had made while there until she was much better acquainted with them than
he was himself. There had been no sketch of Garda Thorne, no sketch in
words or water-colors; but perhaps if her jealousies had been less
evident, there might have been. She knew that her jealousies were a
weakness. That did not make them any the less hard to bear; it was, each
separate time, as if Lucian and the person he was for the moment
admiring were engaged in stabbing her to the heart; only, in some
miraculous way, she lived on.

On the present occasion she said no more about southern patriotism, but
gazed in silence at the near shores as the skiffs glided round the next
bend. They were in a wide salt-marsh, a flat reedy sea; the horizon
line, unbroken by so much as a bush, formed an even circle round them.
It was high tide, the myriad little channels were full, the whole marsh
was afloat; the breeze fannin