A strange trouble seized upon her—her breast heaved under the pressure of her emotion. She did not at all comprehend the delicious sensations which at times made her quiver. Her eye, veiled with a soft languor, rested involuntarily on this man, handsome as an ancient Antinous, who with his haughty glance, his indomitable character, whom a frown from her made tremble—the wild son of the desert, who had hitherto known no will but his own!
On seeing him, so handsome and so brave, she felt herself attracted to him by all the strength of her soul. Though she was ignorant of the word love, for some time an unconscious revolution had taken place in her mind: she now began to understand that divine union of two souls, which are commingled in one, in an eternal communion of thoughts of joy and suffering.
In a word, she was about to love!
"What do you want with me, Shaw?" she asked, timidly.
"I wish to tell you, señorita," he answered, in a rough voice, marked, however, with extraordinary tenderness, "that, whatever may happen, whenever you have need of a man to die for you, you will have no occasion to seek him for I will be there."
"Thanks," she answered, smiling, in spite of herself, at the strangeness of the offer and the way in which it was made; "but here we have nothing to fear."
"Perhaps," he went on. "No one knows what the morrow has in store."
Women have a decided taste for taming ferocious animals: like all natures essentially nervous, woman is a creature of feeling, whose passion dwells in her head rather than in her heart. Love with a woman is only an affair of pride or a struggle to endure: as she is weak, she always wishes to conquer, and above all dominates at the outset, in order to become presently more completely the slave of the man she loves, when she has proved her strength, by holding him panting at her feet.
Owing to that eternal law of contrasts which governs the world, a woman will never love any man but him who, for some reason or another, flatters her pride. At any rate, it is so in the desert. I do not pretend to speak for our charming European ladies, who are a composite of grace and attraction, and who, like the angels, only belong to humanity, by the tip of their little wing, which scarce grazes the earth.
Doña Clara was a Mexican. Her exceptional position among Indians, the dangers to which she had been exposed, the weariness that undermined her—all these causes combined must dispose her in favour of the young savage, whose ardent passion she divined, with that intuition peculiar to all women.