Besides I may some day require it as a novelty to distract me--so I'll wait." She rose a moment later, and stood, distrait, looking out across the sunlit world.

He at her elbow, head bent, idly watched the smoke curling upward from his cigarette.
Presently, as though moved by a common impulse, they turned together, slowly traversed the terrace and the long pergola all crimson and white with bougainvillia and jasmine, and entered the jungle road beyond the courts where carved seats of coquina glimmered at intervals along the avenue of oaks and palmettos and where stone-edged pools reflected the golden green dusk of the semi-tropical foliage above.
On the edge of one of these basins the girl seated herself; without her hat and gloves and in a gown which exposed throat and neck she always looked younger and more slender to him, the delicate modelling of the neck and its whiteness was accentuated by the silky growth of the brown hair which close to the nape and brow was softly blond like a child's.
The frail, amber-tinted little dragon-flies of the South came hovering over the lotus bloom that edged the basin; long, narrow-shaped butterflies whose velvet-black wings were barred with brilliant stripes of canary yellow fluttered across the forest aisle; now and then a giant papilio sailed high under the arched foliage on tiger-striped wings of chrome and black, or a superb butterfly in pearl white and malachite green came flitting about the sparkle-berry bloom.
The girl nodded toward it.

"That is a scarce butterfly here," she said.
"Gray would be excited.

I wish we had his net here." "It is the _Victorina_, isn't it ?" he asked, watching the handsome, nervous-winged creature which did not seem inclined to settle on the white flowers.
"Yes, the _Victorina steneles_.

Are you interested ?" "The generation I grew up with collected," he said.