Here was a woman who looked to be happy. And more—she looked to be content. Had a poet been inspired to pen just similes concerning her favour, he would have likened her full, clear eyes, with their white-encircled, gray irises, to moonflowers. With none of the goddesses whose traditional charms have become coldly classic would the discerning rhymester have compared her. She was purely Paradisaic, not Olympian. If you can imagine Eve, after the eviction, beguiling the flaming warriors and serenely re-entering the Garden, you will have her. Just so human, and still so harmonious with Eden seemed Mrs. Goodwin. When her husband entered she looked up, and her lips curved and parted; her eyelids fluttered twice or thrice—a movement remindful (Poesy forgive us!) of the tail-wagging of a faithful dog—and a little ripple went through her like the commotion set up in a weeping willow by a puff of wind. Thus she ever acknowledged his coming, were it twenty times a day. If they who sometimes sat over their wine in Coralio, reshaping old, diverting stories of the madcap career of Isabel Guilbert, could have seen the wife of Frank Goodwin that afternoon in the estimable aura of her happy wifehood, they might have disbelieved, or have agreed to forget, those graphic annals of the life of the one for whom their president gave up his country and his honour. “I have brought a guest to dinner,” said Goodwin. “One Colonel Falcon, from San Mateo. He is come on government business. I do not think you will care to see him, so I prescribe for you one of those convenient and indisputable feminine headaches.” “He has come to inquire about the lost money, has he not?” asked Mrs. Goodwin, going on with her sketch. “A good guess!” acknowledged Goodwin. “He has been holding an inquisition among the natives for three days. I am next on his list of witnesses, but as he feels shy about dragging one of Uncle Sam’s subjects before him, he consents to give it the outward appearance of a social function. He will apply the torture over my own wine and provender.” “Has he found anyone who saw the valise of money?” “Not a soul. Even Madama Ortiz, whose eyes are so sharp for the sight of a revenue official, does not remember that there was any baggage.” Mrs. Goodwin laid down her brush and sighed. “I am so sorry, Frank,” she said, “that they are giving you so much trouble about the money. But we can’t let them know about it, can we?” “Not without doing our intelligence a great injustice,” said Goodwin, with a smile and a shrug that he had picked up from the natives. “_Americano_, though I am, they would have me in the _calaboza_ in half an hour if they knew we had appropriated that valise. No; we must appear as ignorant about the money as the other ignoramuses in Coralio.” “Do you think that this man they have sent suspects you?” she asked, with a little pucker of her brows.