"Choose what pleases you most, Señor Jim," she said. "That I may make you a rich gift."
But though for a moment the glowing pearls, the gold and silver trinklets held his eyes, he shook his head.
"It strikes me," he said bluntly, "that you and I are not such friends that rich gifts need pass from one to the other of us."
"Then not even all this," and with a quick gesture she indicated all of the wealth that surrounded him, "can move you? Are you man, Jim Kendric, or a mechanical thing of levers and springs set into a man's form?"
"I have never had the modern madness of lusting for gold; that is all," he told her.
"Not entirely modern," she retorted, "since here are ancient hoardings; nor yet entirely mad, since it is pure wisdom to put out a hand for the supreme lever of worldly power. You are a strange man, Señor Jim!"
"I am what I am," he said simply. "And, like other men, content with my own desires and dreamings."
She studied him, for a while in open perplexity, then in as frank a glowing admiration. That he should set aside with a careless hand that which meant so much to her, but made of him in her eyes a sort of superman.
"The thing to do," said Kendric out of a short silence, "is to open your doors and let me go back to the States. I came here looking for treasure trove; your claim antedates mine and I am no highwayman."
Zoraida seated herself in a big carved chair by the long table whereon lay the ancient writings, folded like fans and protected between leaves of decorated woods of various shapes and colors.