“You’d know him for his mother’s son
By peasant dress of Aragon.
“You’d know him for my husband dear
By broidered kerchief on his spear.
“The one I broider now is wet.
Oh, may I see him wear it yet!”
With the last word of the song all the little figures in the circle flung themselves face downward on the ground, so impetuously that Carmencita and Pepito bumped their heads together and set up such a duet of stormy weeping that, for dramatic close, there was nothing left to be desired.
Don Carlos swung Pilarica, hotter and more weary than Rafael himself, to her feet, and as she smiled up into his face, she saw in it, for all its gravity, a great relief.
Tia Marta, too, who met them at the garden gate, was quick to read his look.
“Your heart has been taking a bath of roses,” she said.
And Don Carlos, in the same breath, was telling her his good tidings.
“Rodrigo drew a lucky number. There is weeping in other homes to-day, but not in ours.”
“Other people’s troubles are easily borne,” scoffed Tia Marta, but the dry, walnut face was twitching so strangely that the children wished it had been polite to laugh.