“Can you not guess?” she asked. When he shook his head she rallied him with a happy laugh upon his dullness. “I think your memory is very poor, Señor Rosario.”
“What—Rosa!” For instantly there flashed up a picture of her wet face looking at him from under her capote hood on the day that he found her standing in the rain beside her fallen horse.
“So you recognize me at last?”
“You don’t mean to say—”
“Si, señor, my husband”—contradicting her laugh, a deep thrill inhered in the words—“it is even so. In the days before the railroad, when there was great travel between San Nicolas and the port, Don Luis maintained houses a day’s journey apart. Though none of our family has visited them in the last two years, they were in good condition when Paulo passed this way at the beginning of the rains. So to-night, Rosario, we bide in our own house.”
Again did her accent on the “our” move and thrill him. Always undemonstrative, however, he merely caught her hand, and so, linked like children, they rode on side by side. At first they observed a happy silence, but presently the trail took on such remarkable likeness to the one they had traveled that other day, proceeding from the stretches of black volcanic rock through copal and scrub oak to sparsely grassed barrens, that the strength of the associations forced them into talk.
“That’s where your horse fell,” he began it. When she agreed, he asked, “I wonder if you had any conception of the risks you were running when you rode behind me?”
Though she knew very well what he meant, she pretended ignorance and made him explain in detail his feelings at the sight of her hands resting like white butterflies on the front of his coat, his sudden emotion when the scent of her wet hair floated over his shoulder, utter intoxication whenever a slip of his horse caused her to tighten her hold on his waist.
“You hid it very cleverly,” was her comment upon these revelations.
“And you never knew it?”