"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," she
concluded triumphantly.

"But I have great appreciation and I am dying to hear it," said
Demorest, trying to laugh.

"Well, poor one, you look so. But you shall lif till another time," said
Dona Rosita, with a mock courtesy, gliding with Joan away.

The "other time" came that evening when chocolate was served on the
veranda, where Dona Rosita, mantilla-draped against the dry, clear,
moonlit air, sat at the feet of Joan on the lowest step. Demorest,
uneasily observant of the influence of the giddy foreigner on his wife,
and conscious of certain confidences between them from which he was
excluded, leaned against a pillar of the porch in half abstracted
resignation; Joan, under the tutelage of Rosita, lit a cigarette;
Demorest gazed at her wonderingly, trying to recall, in her fuller and
more animated face, some memory of the pale, refined profile of the
Puritan girl he had first met in the Boston train, the faint aurora of
whose cheek in that northern clime seemed to come and go with his words.
Becoming conscious at last of the eyes of Dona Rosita watching him from