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 though they cut throats exquisitely too. You speak of them as Latins; but they appear to me as something rather Saracen."

"Yes, probably," Rennie agreed. "It's a mixed blood hereabouts; most of the people have a Saracen mingling by inheritance."

"It seems so," the invalid said; and he grunted. "Wolfish look it gives 'em." He turned his head toward the sea. "I think there are other people here I'd prefer to meditate upon. There, for instance."

He nodded toward the railing that enclosed the garden, and protected absent-minded strollers from walking over the rim of the precipice. It was a scroll of wrought-iron, black against the distant hazily twinkling stretches of sea visible from where they sat; and an American girl, slowly crossing the garden, paused and put her small gloved hands upon the railing, leaning over it to look thoughtfully down upon the surf far below her. Standing so, she was a graceful figure, and the Englishman found her charming.

"How prettily she's put herself in the precise centre of the canvas!" he said, for by chance she stood at the end of a short leafy vista, and was thus, to their view, neatly framed in shrubberies and a low arch of vines trained overhead. "She's like a lovely silhouette