Gracias."

Garda laughed. Her laugh was charming, Winthrop had already noticed
that; it was not a laugh that could be counted upon, it did not come
often, or upon call. But when it did ripple forth it was a distinct
laugh, merry and sweet, and not the mere magnified smile, or the two or
three shrill little shouts in a descending scale, which do duty as
laughs from the majority of feminine lips. Its influence extended also
to her eyes, which then shot forth two bright beams to accompany it. "I
see that it will not do to talk to you as I talk to--to the persons
about here," she said.

"Are there many of them--these persons about here?"

"Four," replied Garda, promptly. "There is Reginald Kirby, surgeon. Then
there is the Reverend Mr. Moore, rector of St. Philip and St. James.
Then we have Adolfo Torres, from the Giron plantation, south of here,
and Manuel Ruiz, from Patricio, opposite."

"A tropical list," said Winthrop; "discouragingly tropical."

"But I'm tropical myself," Garda responded.

She was taking him through a narrow path, between what had once been
hedges, but were now high tangled walls, overrun with the pointed leaves
of the wild smilax. The girl had a light step, but if light, it was not
quick; it could have been best described, perhaps, by the term
unhurrying, a suggestion of leisure lay in each motion, from the poise
of the small head to the way the pretty feet moved over the path or
floor. Winthrop disliked a hurried step, he disliked also a tardy one;
the step that is light but at the same time leisurely--this seemed to
him to mark the temperament that gets the most out of life as a whole,
certainly the most of pleasure, often too the most of attainment. Garda
Thorne had this step. In her case, probably, there had been more of
pleasure than of attainment. She did not indeed strike one as a person
who had given much thought to attainment, whether of scholarship or
housewifely skill, of needle-work or graceful accomplishments, or even
of that balance of conscience, that trained obedience of the mind, which
are so much to many of her sisters farther north. But these same sisters
farther north would have commented, probably, commented from the long,
rocky coast of New England, and from the many intelligent communities of
the Middle States, that no woman need trouble herself about attainment,
or anything else, if she were as beautiful as Edgarda Thorne.

For in their hearts women always know that of