ight talk became his dark girlish face, and whose
redundant locks curled so prettily and so wonderfully black under the
fine white brim of his jaunty Panama. He had the hands of a woman, save
that the nails were stained with the smoke of cigarettes. He could play
the guitar delightfully, and wore his knife down behind his coat-collar.

The second was "Major" Galahad Shaughnessy. I imagine I can see him, in
his white duck, brass-buttoned roundabout, with his sabreless belt
peeping out beneath, all his boyishness in his sea-blue eyes, leaning
lightly against the door-post of the Cafe des Exiles as a child leans
against his mother, running his fingers over a basketful of fragrant
limes, and watching his chance to strike some solemn Creole under the
fifth rib with a good old Irish joke.

Old D'Hemecourt drew him close to his bosom. The Spanish Creoles were,
as the old man termed it, both cold and hot, but never warm. Major
Shaughnessy was warm, and it was no uncommon thing to find those two
apart from the others, talking in an undertone, and playing at
confidantes like two schoolgirls. The kind old man was at this time
drifting close up to his sixtieth year. There was much he could tell of
San Domingo, whither he had been carried from Martinique in his
childhood, whence he had become a refugee to Cuba, and thence to New
Orleans in the flight of 1809.

It fell one day to Manuel Mazaro's lot to discover, by sauntering within
earshot, that to Galahad Shaughnessy only, of all the children of the
Cafe des Exiles, the good host spoke long and confidentially concerning
his daughter. The words, half heard and magnified like objects seem in a
fog, meaning Manuel Mazaro knew not what, but made portentous by his
suspicious nature, were but the old man's recital of the grinding he had
got between the millstones of his poverty and his pride, in trying so
long to sustain, for little Pauline's sake, that attitude before society
which earns respect from a surface-viewing world. It was while he was
telling this that Manuel Mazaro drew near; the old man paused in an
embarrassed way; the Major, sitting sidewise in his chair, lifted his
cheek from its resting-place on his elbow; and Mazaro, after standing an
awkward moment, turned away with such an inward feeling as one may guess
would arise in a heart full of Cuban blood, not unmixed with Indian.

As he moved off, M. D'Hemecourt resumed: that in a last extremity he had
opened, partly from