were
changed. I had lived in a world of swimming green with faint blue
distance; hills ringed us mildly; wide, green fields lapped up to our
houses; islands of shade trees dotted the fields.

My world of romance was blue and gray, with the savage dunes glittering
gold in the sun. Here life was intense. Danger lurked always under the
horizon. Lights, like warning eyes, flashed at night, and through the
drenching fog, bells on reefs talked to invisible ships. Old men who
told tales of storm and strange, savage islands, of great catches of
fish, of smuggling, visited my aunt.

Then, as if this were merely the background of a drama, Deolda Costa
came to live with us in a prosaic enough fashion, as a "girl to help
out."

If you ask me how my aunt, a decent, law-abiding woman--a sick woman at
that--took a firebrand like Deolda into her home, all I would be able to
answer is: If you had seen her stand there, as I did, on the porch that
morning, you wouldn't ask the question. The doorbell rang and my aunt
opened it, I tagging behind. There was a girl there who looked as though
she were daring all mankind, a strange girl with skin tawny, like sand
on a hot day, and dark, brooding eyes. My aunt said:

"You want to see me?"

The girl glanced up slowly under her dark brows that looked as if they
had been drawn with a pencil.

"I've come to work for you," she said in a shy, friendly fashion. "I'm a
real strong girl."

No one could have turned her away, not unless he were deaf and blind,
not unless he were ready to murder happiness. I was fifteen and
romantic, and I was bedazzled just as the others were. She made me think
of dancing women I have heard of, and music, and of soft, starlit
nights, velvet black. She was more foreign than anything I had ever seen
and she meant to me what she did to plenty of others--romance. She must
have meant it to my aunt, sick as she was and needing a hired girl. So
when Deolda asked, in that soft way of hers:

"Shall I stay?"

"Yes," answered my aunt, reluctantly, her eyes on the girl's lovely
mouth.

While she stood there, her shoulders drooping, her eyes searching my
aunt's face, she still found time to shoot a glance like a flaming
signal to Johnny Deutra, staring at her agape. I surprised the glance,
and so did my aunt Josephine, who must have known she was in for nothing
but trouble. And so was Johnny Deutra, for from that first glance of
Deolda's that dared him, love laid its hea