"I'm glad for your sake, dear.

But is she not a little flighty and inclined to flirt a good deal?
I think I've heard so." "She's a young girl who has been severely tried, Richard, and perhaps is not to blame for endeavoring to forget it in such distraction as she can find," said Mrs.Demorest, with a slight return of her old manner.

"I can understand her feelings perfectly." She looked pointedly at her husband as she spoke, it being one of her late habits to openly refer to their ante-nuptial acquaintance as a natural reaction from the martyrdom of her first marriage, with a quiet indifference that seemed almost an indelicacy.

But her husband only said: "As you like, dear," vaguely remembering Dona Rosita as the alleged heroine of a forgotten romance with some earlier American adventurer who had disappeared, and trying vainly to reconcile his wife's sentimental description of her with his own recollection of the buxom, pretty, laughing, but dangerous-eyed Spanish girl he had, however, seen but once.
She arrived the next day, flying into a protracted embrace of Joan, which included a smiling recognition of Demorest with an unoccupied blue eye, and a shake of her fan over his wife's shoulder.

Then she drew back and seemed to take in the whole veranda and garden in another long caress of her eyes.