nner. "I
can understand her feelings perfectly." She looked pointedly at her
husband as she spoke, it being one of her late habits to openly refer to
their ante-nuptial acquaintance as a natural reaction from the martyrdom
of her first marriage, with a quiet indifference that seemed almost
an indelicacy. But her husband only said: "As you like, dear," vaguely
remembering Dona Rosita as the alleged heroine of a forgotten romance
with some earlier American adventurer who had disappeared, and trying
vainly to reconcile his wife's sentimental description of her with his
own recollection of the buxom, pretty, laughing, but dangerous-eyed
Spanish girl he had, however, seen but once.

She arrived the next day, flying into a protracted embrace of Joan,
which included a smiling recognition of Demorest with an unoccupied blue
eye, and a shake of her fan over his wife's shoulder. Then she drew
back and seemed to take in the whole veranda and garden in another long
caress of her eyes. "Ah-yess! I have recognized it, mooch. It es ze
same. Of no change--not even of a leetle. No, she ess always--esso."
She stopped, looked unutterable things at Joan, pressed her fan below
a spray of roses on her full bodice as if to indicate some thrilling
memory beneath it, shook her head again, suddenly caught sight of
Demorest's serious face, said: "Ah, that brigand of our husband laughs
himself at me," and then herself broke into a charming ripple of
laughter.

"But I was not laughing, Dona Rosita," said Demorest, smiling sadly,
however, in spite of himself.

She made a little grimace, and then raised her elbows, slightly lifting
her shoulders. "As it shall please you, Senor. But he is gone--thees
passion. Yess--what you shall call thees sentiment of lof--zo--as he
came!" She threw her fingers in the air as if to illustrate the volatile
and transitory passage of her affections, and then turned again to Joan
with her back towards Demorest.

"Do please go on--Dona Rosita," said he, "I never heard the real story.
If there is any romance about my house, I'd like to know it," he added
with a faint sigh.

Dona Rosita wheeled upon him with an inquiring little look. "Ah, you
have the sentiment, and YOU," she continued, taking Joan by the arms,
"YOU have not. Eet ess good so. When a--the wife," she continued boldly,
hazarding an extended English abstraction, "he has the sentimente and
the hoosband he has nothing, eet is not good--for a-him--ze wife,"