She was seated against the Mission wall upon the little bench which no one but Ignacio guessed was to be painted green one of these fine days, a bronze-haired, gray-eyed girl in white skirt and waist, and with a wide panama hat caught between her clasped hands and her knee. For a moment she was perhaps wondering how to take him; then with a suddenness that had been all unheralded in her former gravity, she smiled. With lips and eyes together as though she accepted his friendship. Ignacio's own smile broadened and he nodded his delight.
"It is truly beautiful here," she admitted, and had Ignacio possessed a tithe of that sympathetic comprehension which his eyes lied about he would have detected a little note of eagerness in her voice, would have guessed that she was lonely and craved human companionship. "I have been sitting here an hour or two. You are not going to send me away, are you?"
Ignacio looked properly horrified.
"If I saw an angel here in the garden, señorita," he exclaimed, "would I say zape to it? No, no, señorita; here you shall stay a thousand years if you wish. I swear it."
He was all sincerity; Ignacio Chavez would no sooner think of being rude to a beautiful young woman than of crying "Scat!" to an angel. But as to staying here a thousand years . . . she glanced through the tangle of the garden to the tiny graveyard and shook her head.
"You have just come to San Juan?" he asked. "To-day?"
"Yes," she told him. "On the stage at noon."
"You have friends here?"
Again she shook her head.
"Ah," said Ignacio. He straightened for a brief instant and she could see how the chest under his shirt inflated. "A tourist. You have heard of this garden, maybe? And the bells? So you travelled across the desert to see?"