Not only was the crowd so great that many a flirtation passed unnoticed, but heretofore Catalina had not observed that the cavalier was companioned. When he whispered to Lydia, however, she saw a man beside him frown and take his arm as if to draw him away, but when she reassured the coquette, this man turned suddenly, his brows still knit but relaxing with a flash of amusement. Then Catalina took note of him and saw that he was not a Spaniard, although nearly as dark as Lydia’s conquest. He was an Englishman, she made sure by his expression, so subtly different from that of the American. He might have been an officer, from his carriage, and he was extremely thin and walked slowly, rather than sauntered, as if the effort were distasteful or painful. His thin, well-bred face looked as if it recently might have been emaciated, but its pervading expression was humorous indifference, and his eyes had almost danced as they met hers. He did not look at her a second time, evidently seeing no profit in the idle flirtations that delighted his neighbors, and Catalina, a trifle piqued, watched him covertly, and decided that he was a nobleman, had been in the Boer War, was doubtless covered with scars and medals. V He did not haunt her dreams, however, and she had quite forgotten him as she watched the sunrise next morning from the long ridge of the Montjuich. Her cabman was refreshing himself elsewhere and she had given herself up to one of the keenest delights known to the imaginative and ungregarious mind, the solitary contemplation of nature. She watched the great, dusky plains and the jagged whiteness of Montseny’s lofty crest turn yellow. Spain is one of those rare, dry countries where the very air changes color. The whole valley seemed to fill slowly with a golden mist, the snow on the great peak and on the Pyrenees beyond glittered like the fabled sands, and even the villas clinging to the steep mountain-side, the palaces in their groves of palm-trees and citron, orange, and pomegranate, all seemed to move and sway as in the depths of shimmering tides. Catalina had the gift to see color in atmosphere as apart from the radiance that falls on sky and mountain, a gift which is said to belong only to people so highly civilized as to be on the point of degeneration. Catalina, with her robust youth and brain, was well on the hither side of degeneration, but in her lonely life and dislike of humankind she had cultivated her natural appreciation of beauty until it had not only developed her perceptions to acuteness but empowered them, when enchanted, to rise high above the ego. She stood with her head thrown back, her mouth half open as if to quaff deeply of that golden draught, fancying that just beyond her vision lay all cosmos waiting to reveal itself and the mystery of the eternal. When she heard herself accosted she was bewildered for a moment, not realizing that she was actually in the world of the living.