“I have told you all this,” said Mrs. Rothe, “partly because the impulse after five years of repression was irresistible, partly to show you that the great tragedy of a woman’s life is when not the man, but she, ceases to love. Better far death and desolation, and a great memory, than a nature in ruins, and the magic that would rebuild gone out of hope forever. As for you—congratulate yourself that you are able to feel and suffer as you have done to-night. Over is a better sort than most. Marry him and prove that you are of greater and finer stuff than I. I should be delighted. And if this girl should develop into a rival of a sort, welcome the stimulation, and show your mettle—”
“I won’t fight over any man!”
“Certainly not. Simply be more charming than she is. Nothing could be easier. You could not make the mistake of eagerness if you tried, but you can be obliviously delightful—and you know him far better than she does, and have no machine-made methods. Now go to bed and sleep, and ignore the episode in the morning. You went to bed with a headache and neither knew nor cared what Over did with himself.”
XXI
Thus it came about that the next morning, not long after dawn, Catalina was leaning out of her garden window humming a Spanish air when Over pushed aside his curtain and looked up expectantly.
“Coffee?” he whispered. She nodded. He pointed down to a little table in the window in the wall. They stole like conspirators through the dark house and down to the garden. Over was first at the tryst, and never had he greeted her with such effusion. He held her hand a moment and gazed solicitously into her eyes with an entire absence of humor as he tenderly demanded if she had been ill or only tired the night before, and assured her of his disappointment in being cheated of their walk. His conscience hurt him, and he felt the more penitent as he saw that disapproval in any of its varied manifestations was not to be his portion. For Catalina looked nothing short of angelic. Her eyes were a trifle heavy, as if with pain, but her beautiful mouth curled and wreathed with sweetness. She wore for the first time a white blouse and a duck skirt, and about her throat she had knotted a scarlet ribbon. The fine, soft masses of her hair looked as if spread with a golden net that caught the fire of the mounting sun, and she looked several years younger, fresher, more ingenuous than Miss Holmes, though older than herself.
She ground the coffee while he boiled the water, and when he alluded, with an enthusiasm that was almost sentimental, to their first coffee-making in Tarragona, recalling the solitary palm against the blue sea, her face lit up and her lips parted. So, all in a night, had their attitude of almost excessive naturalness towards each other dissolved into the historic duel of the man and the maid. Both were acutely sensible of the change, yet neither resented it, for it heralded the new chapter and its unfolded mysteries. Catalina had the advantage, for she understood and he did not; he only felt the subtle change, and the conviction that she was even more provocative than during the episode of the mantilla.
“No one in the world can make such good coffee,” she said, politely, as she sipped hers and looked through the bars at the dark arbors of the park. “I still had rather a headache when I awoke, but this is all I need. Did you go for a walk last night?”
She held her breath, but he replied, promptly: “I walked round a bit with Miss Holmes—that fair girl who sat at the head of the table. But the moon rises late and there was nothing to see. I was in bed by ten o’clock. I hope you will be quite fit to-night so that we can see the Alhambra by moonlight together. I am very keen on that.”