“Why not say it!” he replied. “You are like the cool morning, very fresh. In Mexico, we are the end of the hot dry day.”
He watched her, with a strange lingering desire in his black eyes, and what seemed to her a curious, lurking sort of insolence. She dropped her head to hide from him, and rocked in her chair.
“I would like to marry you,” he said; “if ever you will marry. I would like to marry you.”
“I don’t think I shall ever marry again,” she flashed, her bosom heaving like suffocation, and a dark flush suffusing over her face, against her will.
“Who knows!” said he.
Ramón was coming down the terrace, his fine white serape folded over his naked shoulder, with its blue-and-dark pattern at the borders, and its long scarlet fringe dangling and swaying as he walked. He leaned against one of the pillars of the terrace, and looked down at Kate and Cipriano. Cipriano glanced up with that peculiar glance of primitive intimacy.
“I told the Señora Caterina,” he said, “if ever she wanted to marry a man, she should marry me.”
“It is plain talk,” said Ramón, glancing at Cipriano with the same intimacy, and smiling.
Then he looked at Kate, with a slow smile in his brown eyes, and a shadow of curious knowledge on his face. He folded his arms over his breast, as the natives do when it is cold and they are protecting themselves; and the cream-brown flesh, like opium, lifted the bosses of his breast, full and smooth.
“Don Cipriano says that white people always want peace,” she said, looking up at Ramón with haunted eyes. “Don’t you consider yourselves white people?” she asked, with a slight, deliberate impertinence.