panish woman and she is a good deal like one in her ways."

Honey was right; the "dark one" was lazy. Alone she always flew low, and
at no time, even in company, did she dare great altitudes. She seemed
to love to float, wings outspread and eyes half closed, on one of those
tranquil air-plateaux that lie between drifting air-currents. She was
an adept, apparently, at finding the little nodule of quiet space that
forms the center of every windstorm. Standing upright in it, flaming
wings erect, she would whirl through space like an autumn leaf.
Gradually, she became less suspicious of the other men. She often passed
in their direction on the way to her afternoon vigil with Frank.

"She certainly is one peach of a female," said Ralph Addington. "I don't
know but what she's prettier than my blonde. Too bad she's stuck on that
stiff of a Merrill. I suppose he'd sit there every afternoon for a year
and just look at her."

"I should think she came from Andalusia," Honey answered, watching the
long, low sweep of her scarlet flight. "She's got to have a Spanish
name. Say we call her Chiquita."

And Chiquita she became.

Chiquita was beautiful. Her beauty had a highwayman quality of violence;
it struck quick and full in the face. She was the darkest of all the
girls, a raven black. As Lulu was all coppery shine and shimmer, all
satiny gloss and gleam, so Chiquita was all dusk in the coloring,
all velvet in the surfaces. Her great heavy-lidded eyes were dusk and
velvet, with depth on depth of an unmeaning dreaminess. Her hair, brows,
lashes were dusk and velvet; and there was no light in them. Her skin,
a dusky cream on which velvety shade accented velvety shadow, was
colorless except where her lips, cupped like a flower, offered a splash
of crimson. Yet, in spite of the violence of her beauty, her expression
held a tropical languor. Indeed, had not her flying compelled a
superficial vigor from her, she would have seemed voluptuous.

Chiquita wore scarlet always, the exact scarlet of her wings, a clinging
mass of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose
brilliant lustre accentuated her dusky coloring.

They had no sooner accustomed themselves to the incongruity of Frank
Merrill's conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy
developed what Honey called "a case." It was scarcely a question
of development; for with Pete it had been the "thin one" from the
beginning. Following an inexplicable mas