carried head on glorious shoulders.  Her skin was a golden olive, and it had been hard to say which was the more intensely black—­her hair, or the proud eyes which, turning presently in my direction, seemed to strike upon me as with an actual impact of soft fire.  I swear I could feel them touch me, as it were, with a warm ray, the radiating glow of her fragrant vitality enfolding me as in a burning golden cloud.

I wondered whether her glance enfolded everything she looked on in the same way.  Perhaps it was but the unconsciously exerted force of her superb young womanhood intensely alive.  Yet—­there was too a significant wild shyness about her.  My presence seemed at once to put her on her guard.  The music of her voice was suddenly hushed, as though she had hurriedly, almost in terror, thrown a robe of reticence about an impulsive naturalness not to be displayed before strangers.  As for the storekeeper, he was evidently a familiar acquaintance.  He had known her—­he said, after she was gone—­since she was a little girl.

While he spoke, my eyes had accidentally fallen on the coin still in his hand, with which she had just paid him.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but that is a curious-looking coin.”

I thought that a shade of annoyance passed over his face, as though he had been better pleased if I had not noticed it.  However, it was too late, and he handed it to me to examine—­a large antique-looking gold coin.

“Why!” I said, “this is a Spanish doubloon!”

“That’s what it is,” said the Englishman laconically.

“But doesn’t it strike you as strange that she should pay her bills with Spanish doubloons?” I asked.

“It did at first,” he answered; and then, as if annoyed with himself, he was attempting to retrieve an expression that carried an implication he evidently didn’t wish me to retain, he added:  “Of course, she doesn’t always pay in Spanish doubloons.”

“But she does sometimes?”

“O! once in a great while,” he answered, evasively.  “I suppose they have a few old coins in the family, and use them when they run out of others.”

It was as lame an explanation as well could be, and no one could doubt that, whatever his reason for so doing, he was lying.

“But haven’t you trouble in disposing of them?” I enquired.

“Gold is always gold,” he answered, “and we don’t see enough of it here to be particular as to whose head is stamped upon it, or what date.  Besides, as I said, it isn’t as if I got many of them; and you can always dispose of them as curiosities.”

“Will you sell me this one?” I asked.

“I see no harm in your having it,” he said, “but I’d just as soon you didn’t mention where you got it.”

“Certainly,” I answered, disguising my wonder at his secretiveness.  “What is it worth?”

He named the sum of sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents.  Having paid him that amount, I bade him good-night, glad to be alone with my eager, glowing thoughts.  These I took with me to a bit of coral beach made doubly white by the moon, rustled over by giant palms, and whispered to by the vast living jewel of the sea.  Surely my thoughts had a brightness to match even this glitter of the night.  I took out my strange doubloon, and flashed it in the moon.