Mrs. Bryton could not have put into words the idea of the girl's face; but her own angry blue eyes were caught and held for an instant by strange fathomless violet ones—held until she shrank suddenly, and the color left her face. Yet—as the carriage paused, her head was still turned toward the stranger, and José saw her put her hands suddenly across her eyes with a gesture of repulsion or pain, and sink back on the cushions.
The girl on the horse had not moved a muscle. She might have been carved from marble, for any sign she made after she read the angry insolence of the blue eyes.
"Don Felipe Estevan's daughter," said the Mexican driver, "and here ahead of the carriage of the Señora Luisa—it must be so."
Mrs. Bryton gave no sign that she heard, neither did she glance at the occupants of the carriage as they whirled past; her mind held only one hateful picture.
"Felipe Estevan's daughter" meant that she had looked into the eyes of the "black woman from Mexico" who had come back to her father's land to rule, and the Mexican woman had proven not so black as she had fancied, and had sat there on the crest of the hill with a pride that was half regal,—and almost half barbaric,—as though the highway was her very own—as though the centre of it belonged to her by divine right. Mrs. Bryton's vain soul was fired by a momentary wild temptation to test that divine right, to show her there was one man in San Juan not to be ruled by anyone else if she, Angela Bryton, cared to call him to her side and keep him there. Should she—or should she not?
Teresa was quite right in her fancy that the trick against the Americano had been quite successful enough; it was time the other girl came to claim her own!
En la noche fatal que a tus ojos
Dirigi una mirida ardoro-sa
Comprendi que la dicha amorosa,
No me es dada en el mundo gozar.