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 that happens to be just the shade needed to relieve my deep colors here."

Olga's answer rang with truthfulness, but the little folds sent it off at a characteristic slant. "I wore it, Monsieur, A, because it was cold; B, because it's the only coat I possess."

Grover felt that if he had been a girl he would have bristled even more than Olga had bristled under the Spaniard's ingratiations. It wasn't so much the barbarously caricatured nude studies that one had caught sight of, in a half fallen stack against the table. It was something in the tail of Don Armando's eye: an uncomfortable trick of letting his glance linger a second after his smile had died down. Grover had a similar distrust in watching the movements of his hands. The fingers dragged a moment before relinquishing whatever object they had been holding.

They were admiring the portrait of Floss, and Grover was struck by the superlative skill with which the painter had, on some happy impulse,—possibly with a thought for the price he was going to charge for it,—singled out and delineated all the obviously likable features in his subject. True, he had pruned Floss, sheared off excrescences that made her verge on the blowsy, carelessly given her (Grover counted them in amazement but held his peace) only three fingers and a thumb on one hand, and had made her more elegantly slender than Floss in her most ambitious flights had ever dreamed of being. But this