"Of course I shall be gentle," he said, taking her hand cordially. As he held it he could feel the hard places on the palm which much household toil, never neglected, though never mentioned, had made there.

"But when you see her, when you hear her talk, it may not be so easy,"

responded Mrs. Thorne, looking at him with an expression in her eyes which struck him as containing at the same time both entreaty and defiance.

"It will always be easy, I think, for me to be gentle with Garda,"

responded Winthrop; and his own tone was gentle enough as he said it.

Tears rose in Mrs. Thorne's eyes; but she repressed them, they did not fall. "I depend greatly upon you," she said, with more directness than she had yet used. She drew her hand from his, took up his hat, which was lying on a chair near her, and gave it to him; she seemed to wish him to go, to say no more.

He obeyed her wish, he left the house and went to the rose garden. Here, after looking about for a moment, he saw Garda.

CHAPTER XI.

She was under the great rose-tree. Dressed in an old white gown of a thick cotton material, she was sitting on the ground, with her crossed arms resting on the bench, and her head laid on her arms; her straw hat was off, the rose-tree shading her from the afternoon sun. Carlos Mateo, mounting guard near, eyed Winthrop sharply as he approached. But though Garda of course heard his steps, she did not move; he came up and stood beside her, still she did not raise her head. He could see her face in profile, as it lay on her arm; it was pale, the long lashes were wet with tears.

"Garda," he said.

"Yes, I know who it is," she answered without looking up;--"it is Mr.

Winthrop. Mamma has asked you to come and talk to me, I suppose; but it is of no use." And he could see the tears drop down again, one by one.

"I should be glad to come on my own account, without being asked, if I could be of any use to you, Garda."

"You cannot," she murmured, hopelessly.

His speech had sounded in his own ears far too formal and cold for this grieving child--for the girl looked not more than fourteen as she sat there with her bowed head on her arms. He resisted, however, the impulse to treat her as though she had been indeed a child, to stoop down and try to comfort her.

"I am very sorry to find you so unhappy," he went on, still feeling that his words were too perfunctory.

"I don't believe it; I wish I did," answered Garda, who was never perfunctory, but always natural. "If I did, perhaps I could talk to you about it, and then it wouldn't be _quite_ so hard."

"Talk to me whether you believe it or not," suggested Winthrop.

"I cannot; you never liked him."

A frown showed itself on Winthrop's face; but Garda could not see it, and he took good care that his voice should not betray irritation as he answered: "But as I like you, won't that do as well? You ought to feel safe enough with me to say anything."

"Oh, why won't you be good to me?" said the girl, in a weeping tone, abandoning the argument. "I shall die if everybody is so cruel when I am suffering so."

"I am not cruel," said Winthrop. He had seated himself on the bench near her, he put out his hand and laid it for a moment on her bright brown hair.

The touch seemed very grateful to Garda; instantly she moved towards him, put her arms on his knee, and laid her head down again, in much the same att.i.tude she often a.s.sumed when with Margaret Harold, save that she did not look up; her eyes remained downcast, the lashes heavy with tears. "I cannot bear it--he has gone away," she said, letting her sorrow come forth. "I liked him so much--so much better than I liked any one else. And now he has gone, and I am left! And there was no preparation--it was so sudden! Only yesterday we had that beautiful walk on Patricio beach (don't you remember?--I called to you as we pa.s.sed), and he said nothing about going. I can never tell you how long and dreadful the time has been since I got his note this morning."

"Don't try," said Winthrop. "Think of other things. Some of us are left, make the best of us; we are all very fond of you, Garda." He felt a great wrath against Lucian Spenser; but he could not show any indication of it lest he should lose the confidence she was reposing in him, the confidence which made her come and lay her crossed arms on his knee and tell him all her grief. This confidence had other restrictive aspects, it showed that she regarded him as a species (somewhat younger, perhaps) of Mr. Moore or Dr. Kirby; Winthrop was acutely conscious that he could not play that part in the least; it certainly behooved him, therefore, to do the best he could with his own.

"Yes, you are all kind, I know," Garda had answered. "But Lucian was different, Lucian _amused_ me so."

"Amused? Was that it?" said Winthrop, surprised by the word she had chosen.

"Of course," answered Garda, in the same dejected tone. "Is there anything better than to be amused? I am sure I don't know anything. I was so dull here, and he made everything delightful; but now--" Her tears rose again as the contrast came over her.

"Perhaps, now that you have called our attention to it, the rest of us might contrive to be more amusing," said Winthrop, with a tinge of sarcasm in his tone.

But Garda did not notice the sarcasm. "No," she answered, seriously, "you could not. You might try; but no, you could not," she repeated, with conviction. "For it wasn't anything he did, it was Lucian himself.

Besides, I liked so much to look at him--he was so beautiful. Don't you remember the dimple that came when he threw back his head and laughed?"

She moved a little so that she could rest her chin on her clasped hands, and look up into Winthrop's face; her eyes met his dreamily; she saw him, but she was thinking of Spenser.

"Torres has a dimple too," answered Winthrop, rather desperately. For between the beauty of the girl herself, made more appealing as it was now by her sorrow, her confiding trust that he was prepared to play on demand the part of grandfather or uncle--between this and her extraordinary, frank dwelling upon the attractive points of Lucian Spenser, together with the wrath he felt against that accomplished young engineer--he was not, perhaps, so fully in possession of his accustomed calmness as usual. But she was a child, of course; he always came back to that; she was nothing but a child.

It was true that poor Torres had a dimple, as Winthrop had said. It was in his lean dark cheek, and everybody was astonished to see it there; once there, everybody wondered where it found s.p.a.ce to play. It did not find it in depth, and had to spread itself laterally; it was a very thin dimple on a bone.

But Garda paid no attention to this attempt at a diversion. "Did you ever see such eyes as Lucian's, such a deep, deep blue?" she demanded of Winthrop's gray ones.

"Very blue," he answered. He was succeeding in keeping all expression out of his face (if there had been any, it would not have been of the pleasantest). He felt, however, that his tone was dry.

But acquiescence was enough for Garda, she did not notice his tone; she continued the expression of her recollections. "When the light shone across his hair--don't you remember the color? It was like real gold. He looked then like--like a sun-G.o.d," she concluded, bringing out the word with ardor.

"What do you know of sun-G.o.ds?" said Winthrop, endeavoring to bear himself agreeably in these intimate confidences. "How many of the warm-complexioned gentlemen have you known?"

"I mean the Kirbys' picture," answered Garda, with much definiteness, rejecting sun-G.o.ds in general as a topic, as she had the dimple of poor Torres; "you must remember the one I mean."

Winthrop did remember; it was a copy of the Phoebus Apollo of Guido's "Aurora" at Rome.

"Oh," continued Garda, without waiting for reply, "what a comfort it is to talk to you! Mamma has been so strange, she has looked at me as though I were saying something very wrong. I have only told her how much I admired him--just as I have been telling you; is that wrong?"

"Not the least in the world," answered Winthrop, who had at last decided upon the course he should pursue. "But it won't last long, you know, it's only a fancy; you have seen so few people, shut up in this one little place. When you have been about more, your taste will change."

Garda did not pay much heed to these generalities arrayed before her, nor did he expect that she would. But this was the tone he intended to take; later she would recall it. All she said now was, "Oh, please stay ever so long, all the evening; I cannot let you go, now that you are so good to me." And taking his hand with a caressing little motion, she laid her soft cheek against it.

"Suppose we walk a while," suggested Winthrop, rising. He said to himself that perhaps he should feel less like a grandfather if he were on his feet; perhaps, too, she would treat him less like one.

Garda obeyed him directly. She was as docile as possible. When they were a dozen yards off, Carlos Mateo began to follow them slowly, taking very high steps with his thin legs, and pausing carefully before each one, with his upheld claw in the air, as if considering the exact point in the sand where he should place it next. They went to the live-oak avenue. "How long do you think it will hurt me so, hurt me as it does now--his going away?" the girl asked, sadly.

"Not long," replied Winthrop, in a matter-of-course tone. "It's always so when we are parted from our friends; perhaps you have never been parted from a friend before?"

"That is true, I have not," she answered, a little consoled. "But no,"

she went on, in a changed voice, "it's not like that, it's not like other friends; I cared so much for him! You might all go away, every one of you, and I shouldn't care as I do now." And with all her figure drooping, as though it had been struck by a blighting wind, she put her hand over her eyes again.

"Take my arm," said Winthrop; "we will go down to the landing, where you can rest on the bench; you are tired out, poor child."

Again she obeyed him without opposition, and they walked on; but her breath came in long sobs, and she kept her little hand over her eyes, trusting to his arm to guide her. He felt that it was better that she should talk of Spenser than sob in that way, and, bracing himself with patience, he began.

"How was it that he entertained you so? what did he do?" he asked. There was no indefiniteness about that "he;" there was only one "he" for Garda.

She took the bait immediately. "Oh, I don't know. He always made me laugh." Then her face brightened as recollection woke. "He was always saying things that I had never thought of--not like the things that other people say," she went on; "and he said them, too, in a way that always pleased me so much. Generally he surprised me, and I like to be surprised."