ugh yon shrubbery.
I suppose that's the end of the mysterious espionage you have
discovered. No! De'il take it! but there's that Frenchman popping out
of the myrtlebush. How did the fellow get there? And, bless me!
here's our lassie, too!"

"Yes!" said Raymond, in a changed voice, "It's Maruja!"

She had approached so noiselessly along the bank that bordered the
veranda, gliding from pillar to pillar as she paused before each to
search for some particular flower, that both men felt an uneasy
consciousness. But she betrayed no indication of their presence by
look or gesture. So absorbed and abstracted she seemed that, by a
common instinct, they both drew nearer the window, and silently waited
for her to pass or recognize them.

She halted a few paces off to fasten a flower in her girdle. A small
youthful figure, in a pale yellow dress, lacking even the maturity of
womanly outline. The full oval of her face, the straight line of her
back, a slight boyishness in the contour of her hips, the infantine
smallness of her sandaled feet and narrow hands, were all suggestive of
fresh, innocent, amiable youth--and nothing more.

Forgetting himself, the elder man mischievously crushed his companion
against the wall in mock virtuous indignation. "Eh, sir," he
whispered, with an accent that broadened with his feelings. "Eh, but
look at the puir wee lassie! Will ye no be ashamed o' yerself for
putting the tricks of a Circe on sic a honest gentle bairn? Why, man,
you'll be seein' the sign of a limb of Satan in a bit thing with the
mother's milk not yet out of her! She a flirt, speerin' at men, with
that modest downcast air? I'm ashamed of ye, Mister Raymond. She's
only thinking of her breakfast, puir thing, and not of yon callant.
Another sacrilegious word and I'll expose you to her. Have ye no pity
on youth and innocence?"

"Let me up," groaned Raymond, feebly, "and I'll tell you how old she
is. Hush--she's looking."

The two men straightened themselves. She had, indeed, lifted her eyes
towards the window. They were beautiful eyes, and charged with
something more than their own beauty. With a deep brunette setting
even to the darkened cornea, the pupils were blue as the sky above
them. But they were lit with another intelligence. The soul of the
Salem whaler looked out of the passion-darkened orbits of the mother,
and was resistless.

She smiled recognition of the two men with sedate girlishness and a
fo