“That is the first time I have been really happy since I left home,” she announced, ignoring her precipitately descending relatives. “I feel young again, and I’ve felt as old as the hills ever since I’ve been in Europe. I’ll like you forever because you approve of me, and I haven’t seen that expression on anybody’s face for months.”
“Oh, I approve of you!” said the Englishman, laughing.
They descended, and she challenged him to race her to the parapet that they might limber themselves. He accepted, and, in spite of her undepleted youth, he managed to beat by means of a superior length of limb. The victory filled him with a quite unreasoning sense of exultation, and as they hung over the parapet and looked out upon the liquid turquoise of the sea, sparkling under a cloudless sky, its little white sail-boats dancing along with the pure joy of motion, he felt younger and happier than he had since his cricket days.
“I think we had better not go to the hotel for a time,” he suggested. “I am afraid that Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are in a bit of a wax. Perhaps after they have rested and freshened up they will forgive you, and meanwhile we can explore.”
So they wandered off to the old town until they stood at the foot of a flight of ancient stone steps, wider than three streets, that led up to the plaza before the cathedral. Crouching in the shallow corners of the stair were black-robed old crones who looked as if they might have begged of Cæsar. Passing up and down, or in and out of the narrow streets, to right and left were young women of languid and insolent carriage, in bright cotton frocks and yellow kerchiefs about their heads, young men in small clothes and wide hats, loafing along as if all time were in their little day, and troops and swarms of children. These attached themselves to the strangers, encouraged by the caressing Spanish words of the girl, followed them through the cathedral, and out into a side street, chattering like magpies.
“You look like a comet with a long tail,” said Over. “I’ll scatter them with a few coppers.” He paused as she turned her head over her shoulder and regarded him with a wondering reproach. For the moment her large brown eyes looked bovine. “Do you want these little demons to follow us all over the place?” he asked, curiously.
“Why not?”
“Tarragona is theirs,” said Over, lightly. “They would annoy most women.” He hoped to provoke her to further revelation, but she made no reply, and they rambled with occasional speech through the ancient narrow streets, followed by their noisy retinue, the little Murillo faces sparkling with curiosity and foresight of illimitable wealth in coppers.
But even Catalina forgot them at times, as she and her companion stopped to decipher the Roman inscription on the foundation blocks of many of the houses. Although the houses themselves may have been younger than the huge blocks with their legends of the Scipios and the Cæsars, they were old enough, and the steep and winding streets, with the women hanging out of the high windows and sitting before the doors, all bits of color against the mellow stone, were no doubt much the same in effect as when Augustus and his hosts marched by with eagles aloft.
Catalina, who had the historic sense highly developed and had found her happiness in the past, infected Over with her enthusiasm, and he followed her without protest to the outskirts of the town, and looked down over the great valley beneath the heights of Tarragona, then up past the Cyclopean walls, those stupendous, unhewn blocks of masonry which still, for a sweep of two miles or more, surround the old town.