Catalina turned to Over. “There is no other room,” she said.
Over went into the apartment, and, lifting a mattress and coverings from one of the beds, returned to the hall and threw them on the floor.
“I shall be comfortable here,” he said, curtly, glad of any solution. “Go to bed. I prefer this, anyhow, for I didn’t like the looks of those men down-stairs. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Catalina, and she went into the room and closed the door.
“The English are all mad,” said the woman, and she went to find a candle for the hallway guest.
It is doubtful if either Over or Catalina ever slept more soundly, and the bandits, if bandits they were, went elsewhere to forage. At dawn Catalina was dressed and hanging over the balcony watching the retreating stars. She heard a mattress doubled and flung into a corner. The room was in order. She flashed past Over and down the stairs. “Go in and dress,” she called back. “There is plenty of water, for a wonder.”
And he answered, “Stay in front of the window, where I could hear you if you called.”
Early as it was, the woman and her brood were in the kitchen at the back of the house, and she agreed to supply bread and cream for breakfast and make a tortilla for the travellers’ lunch.
Over came down in a few moments with his coffee-pot and lamp, and they had their breakfast on a barrel-top in front of the inn, as light-heartedly as if embarrassment had never beset them. Life begins early in Spain, notwithstanding its reputed predilection for the morrow, and as they finished breakfast several rickety old diligences drew up between the inn and the station.
There were no passengers for the three little towns, and Over and Catalina went in one of the diligences to Baeza, twelve miles distant. They spent a happy and irresponsible day roaming about the dilapidated sixteenth-century town, and divided their tortilla out in the country in the great shadow of the Sierra Nevada. They retained their spirits over the rough and dusty miles of their return, but lost them suddenly as they approached the station. The train, however, was three hours late this evening, and they philosophically dismissed the Moultons and enjoyed their dinner. They lingered over the sweets and coffee, then paced up and down the platform, the Englishman smoking and feeling like a truant schoolboy. Nevertheless, he was not sorry that the end of the intimacy approached. The results of propinquity might ofttimes be casual, but that mighty force was invariably loaded with the seeds of fate, and he knew himself as liable to love as any man. With the oddest and most enigmatic girl he had ever met, who allured while striving to repel, as devoid of coquetry as a boy or a child, yet now and then revealing a glimpse of watchful femininity, to whom nature had given a wellnigh perfect shell; and thrown upon his protection in long days of companionship—he summed it up curtly over his pipe. “I should make an ass of myself in a week.”