"Well, then it was Wednesday. It was like June. The beggars were having a lovely time. They'd taken off their comfortable winter overcoats with those wing-like, three-leaved capes which they've been wearing ever since the beginning of December, and had gone back to summer things: nice, shady, flapping felt hats and cool clothes; and they were having one of their pleasant little feasts which I used quite to envy them when we first came, while the weather was still very warm. A rough table in the road, close to the stone wall, with thick chunks of black bread, and cheese and salad, and chestnuts instead of the figs they had in autumn, all spread out on a paper tablecloth. They had wine of the country, too, with slices of lemon in it; and when I came along a girl was there, peeling a big chestnut for herself which the beggars had given her. She'd taken off her gloves and laid them on the table, with a perfectly gorgeous gold chain bag blazing with jewels, and a gold vanity box to keep the gloves down. Just imagine! On the beggars table! And they didn't seem to grudge her such splendid possessions one tiny bit. They were grinning at her in the most friendly way, as if they loved her to have pretty things and be rich and beautifully dressed. You could see by their air that they considered themselves chivalrous knights of the road being gallant to a lovely lady. That gloomy old wretch was grinning at least an inch wider for her than he ever did for me; and she was smiling, with heaven knows how many dimples flashing as brilliantly as her rings, while she peeled the chestnut."
"Yes, that must have been Miss Grant!" exclaimed Dick, delightedly. "I never saw such dimples as she's got."
"Or else you've forgotten the others. Well, I walked slowly so as not to break up the picture. She had on a thin veil, so I thought maybe she wouldn't be as pretty or young without it, but it was like a pearly mist with the sun shining on it, and it gave her that kind of mysterious, magic beauty of things half seen which stirs up all the romance in you."
"Don't I know?" Dick muttered. "But she's always got that, with or without a veil. It's a peculiar quality of her features or her expression—I don't know which—that can't be described exactly, any more than the lights on the clouds can, that I see sometimes when I've got up a few hundred feet high in the sunrise. I wouldn't have said all this about her if you hadn't begun. But anybody must feel it."
"I believe the beggars did, without knowing it. I did—even I, a woman. I felt I must see if she'd be as pretty when she lifted her veil to eat the chestnut, so I stopped not far off, on the Monaco end of the bridge, and pretended to tie up my shoe-string. I thought I'd never seen a face like hers—not at all modern, somehow. Who is it says romance is the quality of strangeness in beauty? Hers has that. It seemed to me when she got her veil up that she was more wonderful, not belonging to any century in particular, but to all time, as if thousands of lovely ancestresses had given her something of themselves as a talisman."
"Rose, what a darling you are!" Dick said, seizing her hands and squeezing them hard.
"Oh," she laughed, wincing a little. "You couldn't do that to her with all her rings. I was just trying to draw you! Now I've found out all I want to know. You're dreadfully, frightfully in love with Miss Grant."
"Am I?" he asked. "Perhaps. I'm not sure. Only I see that there's something rare about her, and she's too precious to be living as she does, surrounded by a weird gang who all want to get something out of her, or else to give her something she oughtn't to take. Like that Indian chap, the Maharajah of Indorwana—confound the little beast! He's tried to make her take a diamond star and a rope of pearls."
"I suppose she needn't, unless she wants to."
"Oh, I don't know, she's so good-natured, and somehow childlike. She had both the things on at the Casino last night; said he insisted on lending them to her, for luck, and she didn't like refusing them, as he almost cried. And then there's that jeweller man from Paris—has a shop in the Galerie Charles Trois. She strolled into his place to buy the gold bag you saw on the beggars' table and he went wild about her. Cheek of him! Sent her a bracelet she had to send back. How dare a fellow like that have the impudence to fall in love with a girl like her?"