He, the younger man, too, looked a little Spanish, but less so than Ivy Gilbert did. He was not tall, but fully of medium height: a very handsome man, dark, beautifully built, scrupulously dressed, wearing his good garments indifferently, the flower in his coat as red as the girl’s scarlet peppers, his glance direct, noncommittal, a repose about him which only many centuries of culture can give. His passive face was clear-cut and strong and scarcely more brunette than Ivy’s own.
It was not the girl herself that arrested him first. It was what she said—for it struck a century-old note in his being, and it answered with a throb. He was twenty-seven, a citizen of the world. But he, too, thought kissing an impertinence and a nastiness—and he never had offered it, or suffered it.
Evidently a foreigner—he might have passed to many for an Italian, a Rumanian, a Greek, a Spaniard, or a Russian—of birth. The birth was indubitable, whatever the birthplace.
But one who had traveled far, and watched, would have recognized him as what he was, Chinese.
CHAPTER III
The men lifted their hats, and passed on. General Cordez knew Lucille and had met the Senator’s daughter, but he felt no necessity to join the group of girls on the grass, and no impulse. And the younger man, knowing none of them except for a very slight “bowing acquaintance” with Miss Smith, showed no impulse—if he felt any.
“That was Sên King-lo,” Lucille said, almost excitedly, when the men were out of earshot. “I wish General Cordez had stopped and introduced him to you. He’s all the rage. I did just meet him once. But he never gives me a chance to push it a mite.”
“What is he—what’s his nationality?” Ivy asked.
“Chinese.”
Ivy’s lip curled. “What queer cards Miss Julia knows,” she said.