“Oh! Oh! I am laughing at thee now, little frog! What name wilt thou choose then? Espina, perhaps. Thou knowest Carrasco is a wild bush, on the moors in Spain, where we come from. Wilt thou be the little thorn on the bush? Call thyself Espina, thou art a sprig of the old tree. Entonces, Adios! Señor Espina Espinita!”
“Adios!” said the boy abruptly, flushing with rage.
Ramón took a motor-car to Sayula, for there was a made road. But already the rains were washing it away. The car lurched and bumped in the great gaps. In one place, a camion lay on its back, where it had overturned.
On the flat desert, there were already small smears of water, and the pink cosmos flowers, and the yellow, were just sprouting their tufts of buds. The hills in the distance were going opaque, as leaves came out on the invisible trees and bushes. The earth was coming to life.
Ramón called in Sayula at Kate’s house. She was out, but the wild Concha came scouring across the beach, to fetch her.—“There is Don Ramón! There is Don Ramón!”
Kate hurried home, with sand in her shoes.
She thought Ramón looked tired, and, in his black suit, sinister.
“I didn’t expect you,” she said.
“I am on my way back from town.”
He sat very still, with that angry look on his creamy dark face, and he kept pushing back his black moustache from his closed, angry lips.