“So am I,” and she gave him an enchanting smile, but without a trace of self-consciousness. “How do you find Miss Holmes? I long to meet her. She attracts me very much.”
“Oh, she is very jolly. Can talk about anything and has the knack of your race and sex for putting a fellow quite at his ease. You are certain to like her. She has given up her home life and wanders about Europe for the sake of her sister, who is an artist; has a deuced fine nature, I should say. What?”
“Nothing. Shall we take a walk? We can’t get the cards for the palace for an hour or two yet.”
“I hoped you would feel like a jolly long walk this morning. We really had no exercise yesterday, and after that ride from Madrid I feel as if I’d like to be on my legs for a week.”
They walked for two hours along one of the country roads behind the Alhambra, racing occasionally, glimpsing many beautiful vistas, lingering for a while before the Generalife, the summer palace of the Moorish kings; Catalina gloating over the profusion and variety of the flowers, not only in the famous garden, but cropping out of every crevice of the walls themselves. As they sat in the warm sunshine of one of the terraces she gave him another little lecture on the history of Granada in a curiously exultant voice that made him oblivious of the useful information she imparted. Never had he been so attractive to her as in this new rôle of the mere man endeavoring to propitiate his goddess, and happiness bubbled and sparkled within her; if by chance their eyes met her lashes played havoc with the expression of hers. She radiantly felt that he belonged to her; she obliterated the future and forgot the seductress. She informed Over that it was Granada, Spain, the golden morning, that made her happy, and was careful to remove any impression he might harbor that she was making an effort to please him; for pride and a diabolical cunning stood her in the stead of experience. She merely had put her moody, undisciplined side to rest and exhibited in high relief her luminous, exultant girlhood; and Over stared and said little.
But she was determined that if he did address her it should not be in direct sequence to her wiles, for she had a passionate wish to be sought, to be pursued. She would continue to dazzle him with the jewels of her nature and make him forget the weeds and clay that had inspired him with uneasiness, but she would go no further.
“Come!” she exclaimed, springing to her feet. “We can get into the Alhambra now, and I simply cannot wait any longer.”
“Do you know,” she said, as they walked down the hill towards the fortress, “I have had an uneasy sense of being watched ever since I came here? I was conscious of it several times while we were exploring yesterday, and last night as I sat by my window for a few moments before I went to bed”—she stammered, caught her breath, and went on—“I felt it again; and in the night I woke up and heard two men talking under my window. I suppose there was nothing remarkable in that, but they stood there a long time, and one of the voices, although it was pitched very low, sounded dimly familiar. This morning, just before we reached the high-road I had again the sense of being watched—I am very sensitive to a powerful gaze.”
Over, who was probably afraid of nothing under the sun, was looking at her in alarm. “You know I have always said that you must not go out alone in Spain,” he said, authoritatively. “And there is danger quite aside from your beauty. Not only are all Americans supposed by the ignorant, rapacious lower classes of Europe to be phenomenally wealthy, but Californians in particular. And doubtless California is a legend with the Spaniard. I am not given to melodrama, but there is a desperate lot over in the Albaicin.”
“I don’t see what could happen to me in broad daylight, and certainly I am not going to run after you or ‘Lolly’ every time I want to go out. What a bore!”