aised their angular arms to pluck queer fruit from exotic
trees.

He knew all that, she thought; he had seen that strange landscape
and those brown women, and tasted the fruit they reached to pluck.
Just as he knew those tiny terra-cotta figurines over there, and
that pottery which must have been made out of ruby-dust. Just as he
knew everything. All this had been in his world, always. A world
full of things beautiful and strange. He had had everything that she
had missed. It seemed to her that he incarnated in his proper and
handsome person all the difference and the change that had come into
her life.

And quite suddenly she saw Nancy Simms dusting the Baxter parlor,
pausing to stand admiringly before a picture on a white-and-gold
easel, that cherished picture of a house with mother-of-pearl
puddles in front of it. A derisive and impish amusement flickered
like summer lightning across her face, and with an inscrutable smile
she mocked the mother-of-pearl puddles and her old admiration of
them. She lifted her eyes to the painting over Berkeley Hayden's
mantel, and the smile deepened.

"Perhaps it is her smile," thought he, watching her. "Yes, I am sure
it must be her smile. I am rather glad Marcia is taking her abroad.
I do not wish to make a fool of myself, and there'd be that danger
if she remained." Yet the idea of her absence gave him an
unaccustomed pang.

He filled her quarters aboard ship with exquisite flowers. She was
not yet used to graceful attentions, they had been for other women,
not for her. She had no idea at all that she was of the slightest
importance, if only because of the Champneys money; her comparative
freedom was still too recent for her to have changed her estimate of
herself. She thought it touchingly kind and thoughtful of this
handsome, important man to have remembered just _her_, particularly
when there wasn't anybody else to do so, and she looked at him with
a pleased and appreciative friendliness for which he felt absurdly
grateful. While Marcia was busied with the other friends who had
come to see her off, he stood beside Mrs. Champneys, who seemed to
know no one but himself, and this established a measure of intimacy
between them.

"It occurs to me," said he, tentatively, "that it has been some time
since I saw Florence. All of two or three years."

They stood together by the railing, and she leaned forward the
better to watch a leggy little girl with a brickdust-red pigtail in