“What do you think of the Englishman, Koenigin?” I asked, giving the fire another poke, not from shamefacedness, but because it really needed it, for the evening was damp and chilly.

“I like him,” said Koenigin decidedly.

Koenigin and I were always prepared with decided opinions, whether we knew anything about the subject in hand or not.

“He has a fine head,” Koenigin went on, “quite a ducal contour, according to our republican ideas of what a duke ought to be.  I like the steady intense light of his eyes under those straight dark brows, and that little frown only increases the effect.  Then his laugh is so frank and boyish.  Yes, I like him very much.”

“He has a nice gentlemanly voice,” I suggested—­“rather on the ‘gobble-gobble’ order, but that is the fault of his English birth.”

This is enough of that conversation, for, after all, neither of us is the heroine of this tale.  It is well that this should be distinctly understood at the start.  Somehow, “the Jook” (as we generally called him, in memory of Jeames Yellowplush) and I became very intimate after that, but it was never anything more than a sort of camaraderie.  Koenigin knew all about it, and she pronounced it the most remarkable instance of a purely intellectual flirtation which she had ever seen; which was all quite correct, except for the term “flirtation,” of which it never had a spice.

One of the Jook’s most striking peculiarities, though by no means an uncommon one among his countrymen, was a profound distrust of new acquaintances and an utter incapacity of falling into the free and easy ways which prevail more strongly perhaps in Florida than in any other part of America.  There really was some excuse for him, though, for, not to put it too strongly, society is a little mixed in Florida, and it is hard for a foreigner to discriminate closely enough to avoid being drawn into unpleasant complications if he relaxes in the slightest degree his rules of reserve.  Besides which, the Jook was a man of the most morbid and ultra refinement.  “Refinement” was the word he preferred, but I should have called it an absurd squeamishness.  He could make no allowance for personal or local peculiarities, and eccentricities in our neighbors which delighted Koenigin and me and sent us into fits of laughter excited in his mind only the most profound disgust.  Therefore, partly in the fear of having his sensibilities unpleasantly jarred upon, partly from the fear of making objectionable acquaintances whom he might afterward be unable to shake off, and partly from an inherent and ineradicable shyness, he went about clad in a mantle of gloomy reserve, speaking to no one, looking at no one—­“grand, gloomy and peculiar.”  It was currently reported that previous to our arrival he had never spoken to a creature in the boarding-house, though he had been an inmate of it for six weeks.  For the rest, he was clever and intelligent, with frank, honest, boyish ways, which I liked, even though they were sometimes rather exasperating.