“Sí?” he inquired, looking suddenly up.
“I was thinking what they would say—my mother, Don Luis, the neighbors?”
“Horrible!” he agreed. “Your mother? What would she say?”
As the white hands flew up in a horrified gesture it was the señora herself. “Santa Maria Marissima!”
“And Don Luis?”
Her expression changed from laughter into sudden mischievous demureness. “His remarks, señor, are not for me to repeat.”
“Well—the neighbors?”
Once more her hands went up. “ ‘Was it not that we always said it of that mad girl! Maria, thou shalt not speak with her again.’ ” Smiling, she added, “For you must know, señor, that I have been held as a horrible example of the things a girl should not do since the days of my childhood.”
“Like the devil in the old New England theology,” he suggested, smiling, “you make more converts than the preacher?”
He had to explain before she understood. Then she laughed merrily. “Just so. What they would do were I to marry, die, or reform, I really cannot tell. It would leave a gap almost equal to the loss of the catechism.” She finished with a mock sigh, “They will never appreciate me till I’m dead.”
“Any present danger?”
The smiling mouth pursed demurely under his whimsical glance. “I am afraid not. You saw my performance at supper. I am the despair of my mother, who would have me more delicate and refined.”
“Marriage?”
“No one wants me.”
“Don Sebastien?”
It slipped out, and he was immediately sorry, but she only laughed. “Tut! tut! A cousin?”
Surveying him from under drooping lashes, a glance soft and warm as velvet, she added: “I will confess. There were others. Some too fat, some too thin, all too stupid, here at home. In Mexico they were triflers—or worse. But on the honor of a lone maid, señor, never a man among them.” With a sudden relapse into seriousness she repeated, “Among all of them—never a man.” Though she was looking directly at him, her glance seemed to go on, fly to some further vision which, for one second, set its reflection in her eyes. Then her long silky lashes wiped it out. When they rose again it was over mischievous lights. “Never a man,” with a change of accent.
“But he will come—someday,” he teased.
“And go—after the fashion of dream men.”
“And dream women.”
For a while she studied him curiously. “Then she has not come?”
“Yes,” he answered, with sudden impulse. “But—”
She softly filled the pause. “ ‘But’ and ‘because’ are woman’s reasons.”
“Unhappily, sometimes man’s,” he gravely answered; and, feeling, perhaps, that the conversation was drifting into unsafe latitudes, he rose and began to pull dry grass from the under side of the thatch. “For you,” he exclaimed, with a glance at the bunk. “I knew you wouldn’t care to sleep there.”
Having arranged a thick layer at a safe distance from the fire, he gathered another armful, and was going outside when she called him back. “To make my bed,” he answered her question.
“In the wet?”
“Oh, it isn’t so bad—here under the eaves.”
“Only an inch of water,” she answered him, with pretty sarcasm; and, indicating certain small trickles that were coming through the cane siding, she gave him his orders. “You will sleep here—inside.”
“But—” he began.
“Señor, I said that you would sleep inside.”
As a matter of fact, the “prospect” outside was not inviting, and his acquiescence lowered the quick colors his previous obstinacy had raised. She had already settled down on one elbow; and when, having arranged a bed on the opposite side of the fire, he lit a second pipe, she studied him through the smoke, wondering what pictures were responsible for his earnest gaze. But warmth and comfort presently produced their natural effect, and she began to nod. After a few shy, sleepy glances that showed him still staring moodily into the fire her head sank upon the white fullness of her doubled arm.
As a matter of fact, it was his wife’s face that returned his steady gaze from a nest of red coal. Absorbed in bitter musings, he received the first intimation of Francesca’s sleep from a sigh which caused him to start as though at the report of a gun. Then while the warm blood streamed through his drumming pulses, every sense vividly alive, he looked down upon her. With all the timid awe that Adam must have displayed when he awoke to the sight of Eve he studied this greatest of masculine experiences, a woman clad in the soft armor of sleep.
For some time his senses dwelt only on the fact, and gave him merely the soft sigh of her sleep, the play of firelight over the unconscious figure. But presently his mind began to work, to compare the broad forehead, oval contours, fine-cut nostrils, delicate chiseling of her features, with the common prettiness of his wife. Even the little foot and slender ankle, freed by relaxation from the jealous skirt, helped to emphasize differences wide as those between a hummingbird and a pouter pigeon. It had required the rigid selection of a thousand generations, the preeminence in strength and brains of a line of fighters to produce the one, just as the slacker choice of a commoner breed had created the other; and Seyd, whose own blood had come down through the clean channels of good Colonial stock, recognized the fact. As never before he was impressed with the fatuity of his chivalric rashness. While the firelight rose and fell he strained at the ties which stretched over mountains, desert, plains, binding him to the coarse woman in Albuquerque.
His sudden jerk forward was the physical equivalent of his mental strain. Though homely, even slangy, his mutter, “Your cake is baked, son. The
