As it was getting dusk, Felipe Fortis mounted his horse and rode on to his home in the valley far down the Valdemosa road. And Tomaso, with his handkerchief bound round his hand, walked thoughtfully up to his solitary home. The great problem which he had thought out so carefully and brought to so grim and certain a conclusion had suddenly been reopened. And Rosa had noticed with the quickness of her sex that Tomaso had carefully avoided looking at her from the moment that his good fortune had been made known. His manner, as he bade mother and daughter a gruff good-night was rather that of a malefactor than one who had just done a meritorious action, and Rosa watched him go with an odd little wise smile tilting the corners of her lips.
“Goodnight,” she said. “You—and your fortune.”
And Tomaso turned the words over and over in his mind a hundred times, and could make nothing of them.
Rosa was early astir the next morning, and happened to be at the open door when Tomaso came down the road. He was wearing his best hat—a flat-brimmed black felt—which, no doubt, the girl noticed, for it is by the piecing together of such trifles that women hold their own in this world. There was otherwise no change in Tomaso's habiliments, which consisted, as usual, of dark trousers, a white shirt, and a dark-blue faja or waistcloth.
“Where are you going?” cried Rosa, stepping out into the sunlight with a haste called forth, perhaps, by the suspicion that Tomaso would fain have passed by unnoticed.
He stopped, his bronzed face a deeper red, his steady eyes wavering for once. But he did not come towards the Venta, which stands on the higher side of the road.
“I am going down to Palma—to make sure.”
“Of your fortune?” inquired Rosa, looking at the cup she was drying with the air of superior knowledge which so completely puzzled the simple Tomaso.
“Yes,” he answered, slowly turning on his heel as if to continue his journey.
“And then—?” asked Rosa.