Gore might very reasonably be tired after his immensely long ride, and when he went off to bed Don Joaquin could not feel aggrieved. But he was hardly pleased by the idea that the young man intended to manage his own affairs without discussion of them, and to keep his own counsel.
CHAPTER XIX.
"Just you leave well alone," said Sarella, a little more didactically than Don Joaquin cared for. "Things are going as well as can be expected" (and here she laughed a little); "they're moving now."
Don Joaquin urged his opinion that Mariquita ought to be enlightened as to his approval of her suitor.
Sarella answered, with plain impatience, "If you tell her she has a suitor she won't have one. Don't you pry her eyes open with your thumb; let them open of themselves."
Don Joaquin only half understood this rhetoric, and he seldom liked what he could not understand.
He adopted a slightly primitive measure in reprisal—
"It isn't," he remarked pregnantly, "as if the young man were not a Catholic—I would not allow her to marry him if he were not."
"No?"