"It is the same person," said Vane, with decision. "Is she not just too lovely?" broke in again Miss Westerhouse, with enthusiasm. Vane could not but concur in this sentiment. Miss Morse's interest in him seemed revived. "I suppose we must go back to dinner now," said she. "By the way, we are going to have a straw-ride this afternoon. Would you not like to come, Mr. Vane? The gentlemen are getting it up. Mr. Dibble, here, is chief manager----" Vane said he should be delighted, and they rose to go. Picking up two books and a bonbonnière which lay upon the grass, he followed Miss Morse. He looked at the books as he went, and uttered a slight ejaculation. One, to be sure, was _Lucile_, but the other was a volume of Prosper Mérimée's _Lettres à une Inconnue_. On the way back Vane was presented to several other young ladies, and when he finally entered the hotel piazza, it was in company with a Miss Parsons, of Brooklyn, who in turn presented him to a Miss Storrs, of Cleveland, and left them, as she unnecessarily explained, to dress for dinner. Vane was rather ashamed to own to himself that he was displeased at the acquaintance that seemed to have existed between Miss Thomas and his late companions. Little as he cared for Miss Thomas, there was certainly a world-wide difference between her and Miss Morse, Mr. Thomson and Mr. Dibble; and yet he could not bring himself to admit that he was snobbish or prejudiced. It was simply that the wealth and education of these young ladies had outstripped their breeding, while the young men were still seeking for the first. He pictured to himself Miss Thomas sitting in flannels at Diana's Baths, and going on straw-rides with Mr. Dibble, and the idea was distasteful to him. It was surely an odd chance that he should travel upon her wake in this way. Throughout the afternoon he occasionally caught himself wondering how she would appear in these surroundings. This thing was a mixture of Arcady and an American female college, with a touch of Vauxhall thrown in. And it was only six weeks since he had wandered in the moonlight of the Alhambra; and the harvest was hardly all gathered that had been ripening about the walls of Carcassonne. Vane wished that he could meet these people at home--that he could see their life really as it was. Was this, then, all? It could not be. There must be something more real behind it. Vane could fancy, in the days when he had been in love, himself and her living in that out-of-the-way corner in France, in that forgotten nook sheltered on the backward shores of Spain, eddied in the flood of modern life and civilization, where he had wandered in the pine woods upon Monserrat. But this place, this painted wooden hotel, this company, seemed more foreign to him than anything in the Old World. What was it? What was it that gave the strange character to it all? Was he, then, such a foreigner that he could not understand it? Was even his love exotic, that it seemed impossible here?