Over’s eyes twinkled as he looked at the face between the soft edges of the mantilla.
“Your new rôle is vastly becoming. I had no idea that two days of Old-World discipline could effect such a change. You look as if you had always walked with a duenna at your heels.”
“So I have, nearly always. I never was on the street alone in my life until my mother died. You think me improved?” she added, quickly.
“I did not say that.”
“I have always thought your bluntness the best thing about you—I like the short skirt and covert coat best,” she said, defiantly.
“They do very well to disguise you on the train; but if I never saw you again I should prefer to remember you as you are now—or as you were that night in Tarragona. You hardly deserve your beauty, you know.”
And then, in a new spirit of coquetry, born perhaps of the mantilla, into whose silken mesh many a dream no doubt had flowed, she lifted her chin, dropped her eyelashes for a second, flashed him a swift personal glance. Before he could adjust himself to the new phase, however, she had dismissed it and remarked that she hoped not to meet the Moultons; and, unaccountably perturbed, he replied that they were sure to be fatigued and resting for luncheon.
It would have been easy to avoid them in the dense crowd packed into the plaza before the cathedral, waiting for the procession to pass. Over and Catalina paused a few moments to look at the superb gobelins with which the façade of the cathedral was hung, and then ran the gamut of the beggars and entered the cloister.
“I shall go into the Chapel of the Incarnacion and pray,” said the Señora Villéna, “and meet you here in half an hour—no?”
The Cathedral of Toledo is one of the world’s treasures, and all the world should see it; but for those who would or must read the sights of Europe a hundred descriptions of this vast, complex dream in early Gothic and late Renaissance and baroque have been written; and the best is forgotten at the end of an hour’s visit.