over the pavement, then muskets kindling to a blaze in the sunlit
campos and quenched again in the damp shadows of the calles. His ear
was taken by the vibrant jargoning of the boatmen as they pushed their
craft under the bridges he crossed, and the keen notes of the canaries
and the songs of the golden-billed blackbirds whose cages hung at
lattices far overhead. Heaps of oranges, topped by the fairest cut in
halves, gave their color, at frequent intervals, to the dusky corners
and recesses and the long-drawn cry of the venders, "Oranges of
Palermo!" rose above the clatter of feet and the clamor of other
voices. At a little shop where butter and eggs and milk abounded,
together with early flowers of various sorts, he bought a bunch of
hyacinths, blue and white and yellow, and he presently stood smelling
these while he waited in the hotel parlor for the ladies to whom he had
sent his card. He turned at the sound of drifting drapery, and could
not forbear placing the hyacinths in the hand of Miss Florida Vervain,
who had come into the room to receive him. She was a girl of about
seventeen years, who looked older; she was tall rather than short, and
rather full,--though it could not be said that she erred in point of
solidity. In the attitudes of shy hauteur into which she constantly
fell, there was a touch of defiant awkwardness which had a certain
fascination. She was blonde, with a throat and hands of milky
whiteness; there was a suggestion of freckles on her regular face,
where a quick color came and went, though her cheeks were habitually
somewhat pale; her eyes were very blue under their level brows, and the
lashes were even lighter in color than the masses of her fair gold
hair; the edges of the lids were touched with the faintest red. The
late Colonel Vervain of the United States army, whose complexion his
daughter had inherited, was an officer whom it would not have been
peaceable to cross in any purpose or pleasure, and Miss Vervain seemed
sometimes a little burdened by the passionate nature which he had left