“Not so nice a thing that you should trade a convent garden for it,” confessed Don Ruy––“if the wishing ring were mine you would be wafted there before that star goes pale.”
“Oh!”––and the secretary strove to assume a lightness not to be honestly felt in that chorus of wails. “You would make me a messenger to your lady of the tryst––and I would tell her that since luck with the pagan maids has not been to your fancy, you 308 may please to walk past her balcony and again cast an eye in that direction!”
“And at the same time you might whisper to her that I would not now need to glance at her the second time to know her,” he added. “Even the armor of a Bradamante could not mask her eyes, or dull for me the music of her voice.”
“Excellency!”
“It is a most strange place to make words for the wooing of a lady, is it not?”––asked Don Ruy looking up at the slender form wrapped in the blanket.––“But new worlds are in making when earth quakes come,––and our to-morrows may be strange ones, and––sweetheart comrade, I have lain at your door each night since your head rested on my shoulder there in the arroyo.”
Someway Don Ruy made his arm long enough to reach the blanket and draw the hesitating figure to him, and rested his cheek against the russet sandals, and then a very limp Master Chico was on the ground beside him, and was hearing all the messages any lady of any balcony would like Love to send her.
“I cannot forgive you letting me carry all that water for a fainting fit––and there was no fainting fit!” she protested at last,––“all these days I’ve lived in terror;––not quite certain!”
“Think you nothing of the uncertain weeks you have given me?”––he retorted.––“I had my puzzled moments I do assure you! And now that I think of it––I’m in love with a lady whose actual name I have not been told!”
“Are we not equal in that?” she whispered, and he laughed and held her close as a bandaged throat would allow.