"Oh!"
"Yes. I could probably have gotten a place as dishwasher or even as a 'bus' or porter, in one of the big Miami hotels," he pursued, "or a billet with one of the dredging gangs in the harbor. But somehow I'd rather do farm work of some sort. It seems less of a slump, when a chap is down on his luck, than to go in for scrubbing or for section-gang hustling. There are farms and citrus groves, all along here, just back of the bay. And I'm looking for one of them where I can get a decent day's work to do and a decent day's wages for doing it."
He spoke with an almost overdone earnestness. The girl was watching him, attentively, a furrow between her straight brows. Somehow, her level look made him uncomfortable. He continued, with a shade less assurance:
"I was brought up on a farm, though I haven't been on one since I was eighteen. I might have been better off if I'd stayed there. Anyhow, when a man's prospects of starving are growing brighter every day, a farm-job is about the pleasantest sort of work he can find."
"Starving!" she repeated, in something like contempt. "If you had been in this region a little longer—say, long enough to pronounce the name, 'Miami' as it's pronounced down here, instead of calling it 'Me-ah-mee,' as you did—if you'd been here longer, you'd know that nobody need starve in Florida. Nobody who is willing to work. There's the fishing, and the construction gangs, and the groves, and the farms, and a million other ways of making a living. The weather lets you sleep outdoors, if you have to. The…"
"I've done it," he chimed in. "Slept outdoors, I mean. Last night, for instance. I slept very snugly indeed, under a Traveler Tree in the gardens of the Royal Palm Hotel. There was a dance at the hotel. I went to sleep, under the stars, to the lullaby of a corking good orchestra. The only drawback was that a spooning couple who were engineering a 'petting party,' almost sat down on my head, there in the darkness. Not that I'd have minded being a settee for them. But they might have told one of the watchmen about my being there. And I'd have had to hunt other sleeping quarters."
She did not abate that look of quizzical appraisal. And again
Gavin Brice began to feel uncomfortable under her scrutiny.
"You have an orange grove, back yonder, haven't you?" he asked, abruptly, nodding toward a landward stretch of ground shut off from the lawn by a thickset hedge of oleander.
"How did you know?" she demanded in suspicion. "By this light you couldn't possibly see—"
"Oddly enough," he said, in the pleasant drawling voice she was learning to like in spite of her better judgment, "oddly enough, I was born with a serviceable pair of nostrils. There is a scent of orange blossoms hanging fairly strong in the air. It doesn't come from the mangrove swamp behind me or from the highroad in front of your house or from the big garden patch to the south of the lawn. So I made a Sherlock Holmes guess that it must be over there to northward, and pretty close. Besides, that's the only direction the Trade Winds could bring the scent from."