“Did you never hear of the fisherman who married a mermaid, and she lived happily on shore till she fell in with a seal-skin; when she put it on, and, forgetting her husband and children, jumped into the sea, and never came up any more?”
“Ah, no!” said Alvar. “It is only that I want Cherry to be comfortable while he is down among the fishes.”
“I will take to it some day, for the sake of astonishing Jack,” said Cherry. “But, Alvar, those friends of yours last night were very much interested in my travelling coat, and asked me if it was a Paris fashion. They put it on, and I tried to get Don Manoel into it; but he thought it was a heretical sort of affair.”
“Cherry, if you laugh at Manoel, he will think you insult him. He hates Englishmen, and our father especially. He was angry because you gave the jessamine to Isabel—and—we are polite here to each other; but if there is what you call a row, it is worse than when every one is sulky all at once at Oakby.”
Cherry looked as if the temptation to provoke this new experience was nearly irresistible; but Alvar continued to Mr Stanforth,—
“I am glad that Cherito should laugh once more as he used to do; but my cousin does not understand.”
“My dear Alvar, I will content myself with laughing at you; you always understand a joke, don’t you?”
“I do not care if I understand or no. When I see you laughing,” said Alvar simply, “that is good.”
Something in this speech so touched Cheriton that his laughter softened away into a very doubtful smile, and he changed the subject; but he tried afterwards to propitiate Don Manoel by the most courteous treatment. The Spaniard did not respond, and he perceived that contending elements were discordant in Seville as well as in England.
Carmen and Isabel found novelty less distasteful. It is true that they thought Gipsy’s free intercourse with their cousin Alvar and with the English stranger shocking; but they preferred them to any other subject of conversation, and Isabel in particular made quite a romance of the incident of the Cape Jessamine, and how Don Cherito had looked at her when he gave it to her.