sent situation would have surpassed his most
splendid worldly hopes. It was strange, he thought, how life granted
one by one every desire ... when it was no longer valued: the
fragrance, the tender passion, of Narcisa, the preference in La Clavel
singling him out from a city for her interest!

She smiled at him over her shoulder, and, in return, he nodded
seriously, busy with a cigarette; maintaining, in a difficult pass,
his complete air of indifference, of experience. The hairdresser must
have pulled roughly at a strand for, with a sudden harsh vulgarity,
she described him as a blot on the virginity of his mother; in an
instant every atom of her was charged with anger. It was, Charles told
himself, exactly as though a shock of dried grass had caught fire;
ignited gun powder rather than blood seemed to fill her veins.

Her ill-temper, tempestuous in its course, was over as quickly as it
had flared into being. She paid the hairdresser from a confusion of
silver and gold on her dressing-table and dismissed him with a good
nature flavored by a native proverb. Then, bending above a drawer, she
brought out the vivid shawl in which she had danced. La Clavel folded
its dragging brilliancy squarely along its length, laid it across her
breast, brought the fringed ends under and up over her arms, crossed
them in a swift twist, and she was wholly, magnificently, clothed. She
sat on the edge of a bed covered with gay oddments of attire--fans and
slippers with vermilion heels, lace mantillas, a domino in silver
tissue lined in carnation and a knife with a narrow blade and holder
of silk.

Charles offered her his cigarette case, but she declined in favor of
the long pale cigars Andres and he himself affected. With its smoke
drifting bluely across her pallid face, her eyes now interrogating
him, and now withdrawn in thought, she asked him about Tirso Labrador.
Charles Abbott quickly gathered that his presence was for that sole
purpose.

"I heard all that was said," she warned him; "and I don't want that
repeated. Why did he try to garotte de Vaca with his hands? There was
more in it than appeared. But all Ceaza will say is that he was a
cursed traitor to the Crown. Signor American, I like Cuba, they have
been very good to me here; I like you and your polite friends. But
whenever I try to come closer to you, to leave the stage, as it were,
for the audience, we are kept apart. The Spanish officers who take up
so much of my time wa