if you would
rather go back. Then we will see whom they are most suspicious of, you
or I. A girl may often steal a horse when a man dares not look over the
wall."

In the abstract this was incontestable, but El Sarria only smiled the
more grimly. After all Dolores was the only woman upon whose fidelity
one would be justified in wagering the last whiff of a good _cigarillo_.
And as if reminded of a duty El Sarria rolled a beauty as he dragged one
huge foot after another slowly up the hill in the rear of Concha, who,
her love-locks straying on the breeze, her _basquina_ held coquettishly
in one hand, and the prettiest toss of the head for the benefit of any
whom it might concern, went leaping upwards like a young roe.

All the while Rollo was sitting below quite unconscious of this
treachery. His head was sunk on his hand. Deep melancholy brooded in his
heart. He rocked to and fro as if in pain. Looking down from the
mountain-side Ramon Garcia pitied him.

"Ah, poor innocent young man," he thought, "doubtless he believes that
the heart of this girl is all his own. But all men are fools--a
butterfly is always a butterfly and an Andaluse an Andaluse to the day
of her death!"

Then turning his thoughts backward, he remembered the many who had taken
their turn with mandolin and guitar at the _rejas_ of Concha's window
when he and Dolores lived outside the village of Sarria; and he (ah,
thrice fool!) had taken it into his thick head to be jealous.

Well, after all this was none of his business, he thanked the saints. He
was not responsible for the vagaries of pretty young women. He wondered
vaguely whether he ought to tell Rollo. But after turning the matter
this way and that, he decided against it, remembering the dire
consequences of jealousy in his own case, and concluding with the sage
reflection that there were plenty of mosquitoes in the world already
without beating the bushes for more.

But with the corner of an eye more accustomed to the sun glinting on
rifle barrels than to the flashing eyes of beauty, El Sarria could make
out that the Vitorian in the red _boina_ was following them, his gun
over his shoulder, trying, not with conspicuous success to assume the
sauntering air of a man who, having nothing better to do, goes for a
stroll in the summer evening.

"'Tis the first time that ever I saw a soldier off duty take his musket
for a walk!" growled El Sarria, "and why on the Sierra de Moncayo does
the fello