The young man also looked out. A girl was slowly passing, mounted on a spotted mustang that was wet to his hocks. She was a slender girl, in laced boots, a riding-skirt, and a waist of some thin, white stuff that the wind fluttered. She peered in through the window—a sailor hat shielding her face from the glare on the adobe wall, and her blue eyes fixed themselves eagerly upon Señor John.
“Yes, father,” answered the young painter, and he smiled and bowed to the girl. Having watched after the spotted mustang for a moment, he turned to look the opposite way, where a bobbing black head showed above the untidy board fence that surrounded a near-by house. “Paloma is very beautiful,” he added presently.
The father was searching in the wide seat of his cane armchair. “Aye, señor,” he admitted. “But often a pink dulce has a black pulp.”
“What a contrast to Miss Allen!” the other went on. The spotted mustang was entering the winding street of the pueblo.
The father had found his book, and now paused a moment, his hand on the door-latch. “My peacock, señor,” he said, “does not mean to be vain. But he cares only for the bright feathers that hang upon his body, and he loves to strut. But, Roberta, she is wise and modest, I think.” And he went out.
When Father José had disappeared through the side entrance of the chapel, Señor John opened the front door of the kitchen and stepped down to the flat stone that lay just before it. The front door opened on the father’s garden—the only garden in the whole of Los Morales. Two feet of paved walk divided the garden and led from the door to a weathered picket-gate. All the wide cracks of this walk were well weeded and neatly filled with trowel-marked adobe, and on either side of the walk stretched small squares of bright green lawn. Across these squares now, and across the stone walk, the father’s peacock was strutting, from the rose-bushes that stood against the pickets on one hand to the sweet-pea vines that screened the fence on the other. And, as he paraded, the sun glanced upon his crested head, brilliantly blue breast, and the green-and-gold semicircle of his tail plumage.
The young painter was still watching the bird when his ear caught a song not from the chapel. A girl’s voice was singing it—a clear voice, if a little loud:
The moon is a sun with a veil—
Lift my veil, and behold my eyes shining.
The voice neared, repeating the words but somewhat disconnectedly. Then, “Go on!” cried the voice impatiently, breaking off the song. “Must I carry you!”