"True, señor; and the story of the tragedy made me forget poor Teddy's comedy—one I can't laugh at yet."
"Some day you ask us to a wedding, and you will forget that marriage is a madness," said Alvara.
And then Doña Teresa came slowly out on the veranda in her many folds of black. There was a hard glitter in her little black eyes, but her lips curved ever so slightly in a courteous greeting as Keith Bryton bent over her hand.
"I hear how you telling that story, señor," she remarked, pleasantly. "You think that it is good to tie a gentleman on a bench, and put his heart on a shelf—no?"
"Good? Why, it was the most ghastly heathenish thing I ever heard of. But—"
"But you Americanos think most of the women who do such things," she persisted; "you think it better than to let him live where there are the brown girls."
"Oh—señora?"
He saw that he had irrevocably damned himself in her eyes. She might speak to him courteously through a long lifetime, but one of the institutions of their pastoral life—an institution ignored by the usual guest in the land—had been referred to in a sarcastic manner, and he knew that never again could he expect the good will of Teresa Arteaga. The allusion had been the most distant, the most unintentional, but at the first word the blood of the Mexican was arrayed against the Gringo.
"You think it well when that wife put the knife in the heart of the husband?" she continued. "(Yes, Aguada, I will have a cup of orange juice, and you may bring wine for the gentlemen.) You think your American ladies do that same thing—no?"
"Oh—the old miner never suggested that it was the woman did it—the wife!" he protested. "It was thought to be the work of the old hill tribe of Indians."