“Would that I could give it to you!” whispered Vicente Alcon y Rodriguez.
“You can give me nothing I want!” he was answered, and after this pleasant speech the little señorita shrugged her shoulders.
S. K. said he clenched his hands, glared ahead, and then said: “A copy? A good copy, Fairest Angel of Heaven?”
And she said, “A copy? Bah!” and her lips curled. I didn’t see why he loved her after that, but S. K. said she stimulated his interest by acting that way. But that I wasn’t to try it on him, since his interest didn’t need stimulating. Then Marguerita looked mischievous and said: “The man who would get for me this original, I would give the gift of my love. . . . But it is a poor thing, my little heart, and perhaps not worth the effort to get?”
He said: “You cast me to the depths. . . . How can I live? . . . For this, you ask the impossible!”
And again she shrugged her shoulders.
“Why ask the possible?” she said, “since that I could get myself?” Then S. K. said Vicente went out, sat down on the green bench that faces the side gate, held his head in his hands, and stared unseeingly at the gravel at his feet. He said they both enjoyed acting that way and being miserable, as a good many people do.
And Marguerita laughed in her tinkling way, not seeming to care how unhappy she had made him. Just before they started back to The Biltmore, he spoke to her again. “You meant that?” he said fiercely.
“But certainly,” she replied. “I have said, my heart in exchange for that bracelet!” And then they all got in motors and started off for lunch.
Well, Vicente was determined to get that bracelet, and he set out to do it. Somehow he got into communication with Debson, offered him twenty-five thousand dollars if he got the bracelet and delivered it into his, Vicente Alcon y Rodriguez’s hands, and then he sailed off on another chase, for Marguerita and her papa had started home again.