“I could always talk Spanish, so I talked to the girl. In a way, we were children; but it was not any childishness to me. That girl altered my life. She has been my life ever since, all the life that mattered: the rest was only ropes and weights.”
“You saw her again, then?” Margarita said.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never seen her since, nor heard from her. You see, she was only there by as strange a chance, almost, as I. She came from Santo Espirito, in Andaluz, in Spain. I wrote to her there, but I never had an answer: of course, she would never have written to me.
“I went to Santo Espirito as soon as I could; but that was eight years later. Nobody knew of them there. The place had all changed in the interval, for they had begun to work copper there: it was a mining town.”
“What was the girl’s name?”
“Juanita de la Torre.”
“Would you know her again, do you think?”
“I thought that you were she when I saw you at that window at Los Xicales.”
“I am she,” she said simply. “I am Juanita de la Torre. My mother married my stepfather the year of the picnic. He met her at the picnic for the first time. Four years later we went to live at The Murreys. We took the name Kingsborough when mother married: we’ve been brought up as English ever since. Margarita is my second name; I took to that, because the English cannot pronounce the other.”
“I can, Juanita. Ah! no, no! do not look at that fuse. I will tell you when to prepare. We still have four minutes.”