"Good-bye." She put hers into mine, and I captured it and held it firmly.
"I am going away—but I shall come back again." She tried to snatch her hand from mine at this, but I held it, and, looking into her face, said firmly, "I will not part in anything but good-will, Sarita. And when I come back to Madrid it must be to find you still my friend. Don't let any cloud come between us. There is no need. God knows I would rather have your good-will than that of anyone else on earth. Don't you believe this?"
"You had better not come back. It can do no good," she said. "You have taken sides against me; you set yourself to thwart me in my chiefest wishes; your closest friends are my bitterest enemies. You know this. You know the wrongs they have done me and mine, and yet you make them your friends. It is nothing to me, of course, whom you choose for your friends, but—you choose them." She looked up and tried to smile as though I had convicted myself.
"Do you really think these people, brother or sister, are anything to me? That their acquaintance or friendship, or whatever you term it, would weigh a hair's weight with me against your good-will, Sarita?"
"There are very few in Madrid who would think slightingly of the friendship of such a man as Sebastian Quesada."
"There is one man in Madrid who would give it up without a thought to secure the friendship of Sarita Castelar."
"Yes; but you make my friendship impossible; you kill it with your violent hostility to my work."
"I shall be away I don't know how long—a week, two weeks, a month may be—but I'll make a suggestion. Let us both use the time to try and think out a solution of that difficulty—how to be friends even while enemies of that kind. We are not children, as you said just now."
She shook her head, still declaring that it was impossible; but she smiled as she said it, and the hardness and anger were gone from her voice, so that when I pressed the point, as I did with all the earnestness at command, she yielded; and when Madame Chansette came into the room some minutes later, she was as intensely surprised as she was pleased to find us both shaking hands over the bargain.
The thought that a complete reconciliation was in the making sent me off on my journey with a much lighter heart than I should otherwise have carried, and I set myself diligently to work to try and think of some means of saving Sarita in spite of herself.