“You have wonderful eyes. Although I’m an Irishman I won’t go so far as to say they are pretty, but they look as if they had been born to see so much. It would be difficult to forget them. Upon me soul you are actually trembling. Did you never have a compliment before?”
“Never! And I guess I’ll remember it longer than you remember my eyes. Where did you see me?”
“I was standing at the window of the house in Alvarado Street when you came along from school with a dozen or more of the girls. You all stopped to gaze at a passing circus troupe, and—I noticed you first because you stood a little apart from the others.”
“I usually do,” said Patience, drily.
He did not add that, attracted by the eagerness of her gaze and her rapid changes of expression, he had asked who she was, and that a Montereño present had related the family history and her own notable performances in no measured terms. “She’s got bad blood in her and the temper of Old Nick himself. She’ll come to no good, homely as she is,” the man had concluded. “Curious enough, the boys all like her and would spark her if they got a show; but she’s hell-set on gettin’ an education at present and doesn’t notice them much.”
Patience made him talk on for the pleasure of hearing his voice. “Are you a real Irishman?” she asked.
“Well, I’ve been an American for twenty years, but there’s a good deal of Irish left in me yet, especially in me tongue.”
“I’d keep it, if I were you. It’s nicer even than the Spanish. Do you think our voices are horrid?”
“I think that if you’d pitch yours a little lower it would be an improvement,” he said, smiling. And Patience registered a vow which she kept. In after years when great changes had come upon her, her voice was envied and emulated.
As they left the forest and entered Carmel Valley Patience pointed to her home, then suddenly took the reins from his hand and directed the horse toward the Mission. The waning moon hung over the ocean, and the Mission stood out boldly.