A charro suit, so close to Seyd’s size as to be almost a fit, was the best that Francesca, after a voluble consultation with her maids, could offer in the way of change, and, though he experienced modest qualms at the sight of himself in tight trousers and short bolero jacket of soft leather gorgeously embroidered with silver, they undoubtedly brought out qualities of limb which were altogether lost in his usual clothing. If he could have seen the touch of admiration that softened the mischief in Francesca’s dark eyes when he entered the living-room, his misgivings might have vanished. But the phenomenon occurred behind his back, and his recent vow against “sentimental fooling” did not prevent him from coloring at her whispered remark:
“You remind me of one Señor Rosario.”
Later, he was to spend considerable time trying to appease conscience with plausible explanations of his feeling, to set it down to relief that their adventure had brought her no trouble. But while relief may have entered in, it was principally due to the fact that she had chosen to retie the thread of their acquaintance just where it had been severed by Sebastien’s intrusion. Yet, whatsoever its constituents, his pleasant embarrassment did not paralyze his tongue.
“I cannot return the compliment.”
Neither could he. With Rosa, the pretty peona, this young lady in foamy white had nothing in common, and Rosa would have certainly felt out of place amidst the luxurious appointments of the room. Ample in all its dimensions, the furnishings had evidently been selected from the garnered treasures of several generations, with such taste, however, that the unmatched pieces made a harmonious whole. The old hangings which excluded the damp night, the old rugs on the mahogany floor, and old furniture lent each other countenance, melted into a rich design. Even the grand piano, undoubtedly the latest addition, was taking the tone of age. Only the bookcases which flanked the great fireplace displayed a modern note, for in them fine editions of English classics crowded the novels and plays of Cervantes and Lope Felix de Vega, Daudet, Flaubert, Anatole France, De Maupassant, competed for room with Spanish and English translations of the modern Russians.
“Her taste,” Seyd had summed the room. “Your books?” he asked, with a nod at these astonishing shelves.
“Yes, no one else reads them.” She added, with smiling directness: “Or could understand. If the dear mother read French, oh, what a bonfire we should have!”
“And you like them—the Frenchmen?”
“Some—in some things.” Her brows arching in the effort for clear expression, she went on: “They know life, and one cannot but enjoy their beautiful style. But”—the delicate penciling drew even finer—“they see only with the eye. They are brilliant—as diamonds, and just as hard, cold. They analyze, dissect, probe life, take it apart, then forget to put it together. Love they see only as passion devoid of sympathy, affection, friendship. Their art is of the senses, their refinement—of manner. Under the veneer they are gross and hard.”
To his astonishment she had expressed his own feeling for French literature, and, intensely curious, he went on probing her with questions, in his interest forgetting both his clothes and hunger till Don Luis interrupted.
“Lindita, the señor cannot live on words. The girls are calling dinner.”
But after the meal—which was set out with silver, glass, napery, all of the finest, and served by brown maids who moved in and out with the soft stealth of bare feet—they went at their talk again, gleaning in fields of common knowledge while Don Luis alternately smoked and dozed by the fire.
It was a revelation for Seyd, and while he watched the play of feeling over her face, the flow of her soft color, the swift moods of the arched brows, and the lighting and lowering of dark eyes in unison with the change of her talk, his hardy resolution of yesterday—already sapped by his present luxurious comfort—underwent further disintegration.
“After all,” he thought, “why shouldn’t I run down and see them occasionally?”
Following Don Luis to his bedroom, he arrived at this conclusion, and in his argument with Conscience he reaffirmed it with even greater force. “After all the old man’s kindness it would be blackly ungrateful to flout his hospitality.”
“No reason why you should,” Conscience conceded, but added the unpleasant rider, “providing you don’t sail under false colors.”
“Of course!” Seyd here grew quite huffy with Conscience. “I always intended to let her know I was married—not that it is necessary. I’m not so conceited as to think that she feels the slightest personal interest in me.”
If it were really sincere his belief might have been shaken, could he have reviewed a little scene that was being enacted at that very moment across the patio. After the waif from the floods had been bathed and fed she was put to bed on a couch in Francesca’s own room, and, aroused by the brilliant sheen of wax candles on the dresser, she lay and watched with eyes of awe the young lady at her toilet. In her simple sight the dresser, with its big French mirror and gleaming silver appointments, doubtless appeared as the altar before which was being accomplished the marvelous transmutation of a woman into the exact semblance of those angels of light pictured on the stained windows of the church of Chilpancin. From the plaiting of the dark cloud of hair into a thick cable, to the final assumption of filmy white, she remained quiet as a mouse. Francesca had risen to blow out the candles before a small voice rose behind her.
“He said you were beautiful. Could he but see thee now!”
After a sudden start Francesca moved over to the couch and collapsed beside it in a white heap.
“Awake, niña? What is this? He said I was beautiful?
