The other girls wore flowers—tea-roses and violets—as girls should. But Ivy had robbed Miss Julia’s kitchen-garden of a handful of red, red peppers, and fastened them in her gown. And odd as the garniture was, no one had commented on it. Ivy Gilbert always was doing something “queer,” and no one had exclaimed at her wearing of “vegetables.” And certainly the scarlet peppers suited her. Her passionate, brunette face, with its soft, mutinous, gold-brown eyes, its vivid, curved lips, its crown of dark, curling hair, and its accentuation of darker eyebrows and up-curling long lashes, looked more Spanish than English, as she sat there in the bright green “twilight,” in her jade-green gown, and the brilliant red peppers jolting each other at her breast. Lucille hastened to change the subject. “Why didn’t you come to Mrs. Trull’s breakfast?” she asked. Ivy shrugged again. “You don’t like Maggie Trull, do you?” Molly asked. “I do, so much; why ever don’t you?” “She kisses me!” Ivy said angrily, just as two men came through the gleaming trees. “I hate to be kissed! It’s a loathsome, indecent thing. I never can forgive any one who kisses me!” The men had heard. The white-haired elder smiled a little under his white mustache. But his younger companion gravely regarded the girl who had spoken, and approval lit in his black, inscrutable eyes. 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.