“Can they?” said Rupert. “Shut up, Jack; you don’t understand. We only want you to tell us how you do in Spain. Affaires du coeur—you know, Alvar.”
Alvar looked round with an air half-shrewd, half-sentimental; while Cheriton listened a little seriously. He knew very little of Alvar’s former life; perhaps because he had been too reticent to ask him questions; perhaps because Alvar found himself in the presence of a standard higher than he was accustomed to. Anyway, Nettie might have heard his present revelations.
“There was a time,” he said, sighing, “when I did not intend to come to England—when I had sworn to be for ever a Spaniard. Ah, my cousin, if you had seen my Luisa, you would not have wondered. I sang under her window; I went to mass that I might gaze on her.”
“Did you now? Foreign customs!” interposed Rupert; while Cherry laughed, though he felt they were hardly treating Alvar fairly.
“I knew not how to speak to her. She was never alone; and it was whispered that she was already betrothed. But one day she dropped her fan.”
“No, no—surely?” said Cherry.
“I seized it, I kissed it, I held it to my heart,” said Alvar, evidently enjoying the narration, “and I returned it. There were looks between us—then words. Ah, I lived in her smiles. We met, we exchanged vows, and I was happy!”
Rupert listened to this speech with amusement, which he could hardly stifle. It was inexpressibly ludicrous to Cheriton; but the fun was lost in the wonder whether Alvar meant what he said. This was neither like the joking sentiment nor the pretended indifference of an Englishman’s reference to such passages in his life; yet the memory evidently cost Alvar no pain. Jack sat, looking totally disgusted.
“At last,” Alvar went on, “we were discovered. Ah, and then my grandfather was enraged, and her parents, they refused their consent, since she was betrothed already. I am an Englishman, and I do not weep when I am grieved, but my heart was a stone. I despaired.”
“She must have been a horrid little flirt not to tell you she was engaged,” said Jack.