Then she nodded slowly.
"You do not like him?"
"Just like a nose-bleed. The day you and I are married I'm going
to send him a wreath of poison ivy."
"It pleases you always to joke."
"No joke about that. You won't give in, will you?"
"There is no question of force nor of surrender, senor. I insist
now that we shall speak of other things."
A few moments later he was constrained to rejoin his hostess'
party.
"When are you going back to Las Savannas?" he asked, as he
reluctantly arose.
"To-morrow."
"The hunting ought to be good-"
But she frowned at him in annoyance, and he left her, after all,
without knowing whether he had gained or lost ground. Of one thing
only he was sure-their meeting had been in some respects a
disappointment. She was not by any means so warm and impulsive as
he had supposed. Her girlishness, her simplicity, her little
American ways, cloaked a deep reserve and a fine sense of the
difference in their positions. She could be Spanish enough when
she chose, he perceived, and he felt, as he was intended to feel,
that the little lady of quality he had met to-night would be much
harder to win than the girl of the woods. The plague of it was
that, if anything, he was more in love with the definite and
dazzling Gertrudis Garavel than he had been with the mysteriously
alluring Chiquita.
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