“She is no longer a child,” said Lilian, “Her father writes that he hardly dares call her the same name, she is so changed.  While I have been withering up in the North, two equatorial years down here have wrought upon her as they do upon the flowers.  He says no Spanish woman rivals her.  Well, it will please—­”

Just then Reyburn handed her the glass he had been using, and pointed it for her.

“Can it be possible?” said Lilian.  “Has Helen been transfigured to that?” and something, she knew not what, sent a quiver through her and made the image in the glass tremble—­the image of a tall and shapely girl whose round and perfect figure swayed to the boat’s motion, lithe as a reed to the wind, while she stood erect looking at something that had been pointed out, and the boatmen paused with their oars in the air; the image of a face on whose dark cheek the rose was burning, in whose dark eye a veiled lustre was shining, around whose creamy brow the raven hair escaped in countless tendril-like ringlets, and whose smile, as she seemed to speak to some one while she stood in the low sunset light, had a radiance of its own.  As Lilian looked upon this dazzling picture, backed by the golden and rosy sky, the golden and rosy waters, the palm-plumes tossing in the purpling distance, the silver flashing of the oars, the quiver came again, and she gave the glass to Reyburn, who held it steadily till the boat was within hailing distance, and who himself at last handed the shining creature on board and led her to Lilian and her mother.  And then the Beachbird slowly spread her wings, and with her new burden softly floated away into the dusk, and the great colors faded, and the stars one after another seemed to drop low and hang from the heavens like lamps, and rich odors floated off from the receding land, and they moved along folded in the dark splendor of the tropical night.  But in some vague way every soul on board the little yacht felt the presence of another influence, and that, though they sailed in the same waters as yesterday, it was in another atmosphere; for an element had come among them that should produce a transformation as powerful as though it wrought a chemic change of their atoms.

Lilian and Reyburn still paced the deck, after their custom, when the first greetings were over, leaving Helen and her father with John for the present.  But as the conversation dropped more personal subjects, and John and his father were discussing political matters, Helen began to look about, and chiefly she surveyed Lilian.  And as she saw the transparent skin, the vivid flush, the restless air—­saw the way Reyburn had, as he walked with her, as he bent to her, as he folded her shawl about her—­the way he had of absorbing her, a hasty remembrance of the night when he stooped over Lilian’s hand came to her, and she remembered also how she herself had hated him.  “The man has bewitched her,” said Helen an hour afterward—­an hour of