“I hope you are not hurt?” said the circuit preacher, gravely.
She broke into a laugh so silvery that he thought it no extravagance to liken it to the moonbeams that played over her made audible. She was lithe, yet plump; barred with black and yellow and small-waisted like a pretty wasp. Her complexion in that light was a sheen of pearl satin that made her eyes blacker and her little mouth redder than any other color could. She was small, but, remembering the fourteen-year-old wife of the shopkeeper, he felt that, for all her childish voice and features, she was a grown woman, and a sudden shyness took hold of him.
But she looked pertly in his face, stood her guitar upright before her, and put her hands behind her back as she leaned saucily against the wall and shrugged her shoulders.
“It was the fault of you,” she said, in a broken English that seemed as much infantine as foreign. “What for you not remain to yourself in your own CASA? So it come. You creep so—in the dark—and shake my wall, and I fall. And she,” pointing to the guitar, “is a'most broke! And for all thees I have only make to you a serenade. Ingrate!”
“I beg your pardon,” said Masterton quickly, “but I was curious. I thought I might help you, and—”
“Make yourself another cat on the wall, eh? No; one is enough, thank you!”
A frown lowered on Masterton's brow. “You don't understand me,” he said, bluntly. “I did not know WHO was here.”
“Ah, BUENO! Then it is Pepita Ramirez, you see,” she said, tapping her bodice with one little finger, “all the same; the niece from Manuel Garcia, who keeps the Mission garden and lif there. And you?”
“My name is Masterton.”
“How mooch?”