She again shrugged her shoulders. “Quien sabe.” After a pause she added with infinite gravity: “And before he have reform, it is bad for the menage. I should invite to my house some friend. They arrive, and one say, 'I have not the watch of my pocket,' and another, 'The ring of my finger, he is gone,' and another, 'My earrings, she is loss.' And I am obliged to say, 'They reside now in the pocket of my hoosband; patience! a little while—perhaps to-morrow—he will restore.' No,” she continued, with an air of infinite conviction, “it is not good for the menage—the necessity of those explanation.”
“You told me he was handsome,” said Joan, passing her arm carelessly around Dona Rosita's comfortable waist. “How did he look?”
“As an angel! He have long curls to his back. His moustache was as silk, for he have had never a barber to his face. And his eyes—Santa Maria!—so soft and so—so melankoly. When he smile it is like the moonlight. But,” she added, rising to her feet and tossing the end of her lace mantilla over her shoulder with a little laugh—“it is finish—Adelante! Dr-rrive on!”
“I don't want to destroy your belief in the connection of your friend with the road agents,” said Demorest grimly, “but if he belongs to their band it is in an inferior capacity. Most of them are known to the authorities, and I have heard it even said that their leader or organizer is a very unromantic speculator in San Francisco.”
But this suggestion was received coldly by the ladies, who superciliously turned their backs upon it and the suggester. Joan dropped her voice to a lower tone and turned to Dona Rosita. “And you have never seen him since?”
“Never.”
“I should—at least, I wouldn't have let it end in THAT way,” said Joan in a positive whisper.
“Eh?” said Dona Rosita, laughing. “So eet is YOU, Juanita, that have the romance—eh? Ah, bueno! 'you have the house—so I gif to you the lover also.' I place him at your disposition.” She made a mock gesture of elaborate and complete abnegation. “But,” she added in Joan's ear, with a quick glance at Demorest, “do not let our hoosband eat him. Even now he have the look to strangle ME. Make to him a little lof, quickly, when I shall walk in the garden.” She turned away with a pretty wave of her fan to Demorest, and calling out, “I go to make an assignation with my memory,” laughed again, and lazily passed into the shadow. An ominous silence on the veranda followed, broken finally by Mrs. Demorest.
“I don't think it was necessary for you to show your dislike to Dona Rosita quite so plainly,” she said, coldly, slightly accenting the Puritan stiffness, which any conjugal tete-a-tete lately revived in her manner.
“I show dislike of Dona Rosita?” stammered Demorest, in surprise. “Come, Joan,” he added, with a forgiving smile, “you don't mean to imply that I dislike her because I couldn't get up a thrilling interest in an old story I've heard from every gossip in the pueblo since I can remember.”