“But, yes to what?”
“Ah! your heart will tell you.”
“What is that? What about the heart?” asked Don Mariano, standing in the door. “This looks like love-making. I am interested. Let me hear a little of it,” said he, pulling after him a chair, to sit between Clarence and his wife.
“It is love-making, only it is by proxy, and I am to guess at things without being told,” said she, still laughing.
Clarence was greatly embarrassed. He knew he had not formally asked for the hand of Mercedes in the serious manner that the subject merited, but he had been carried away by his fears, then by his hopes, and the matter was launched before he could scarcely say how. When for months past he had thought, time and again, of a probable interview with Doña Josefa, he had imagined himself talking to that queenly lady in his most stately Spanish. But now he had taken hold of Cervantes' language—I may say, jumped into it, just as he had jumped on the steamer's deck, thinking of no difficulties in the way, except that they must be overcome in order to reach Mercedes.
He gave a most appealing look to Don Mariano, whose kind heart immediately responded by saying to his wife:
“If it is love-making, and you are to guess at it, there won't be much delay, for no woman was ever slow to guess such matters. I know you understood me very quickly.”
“Hear him! but please do not learn such frightful lessons in vanity and conceit,” said she, laughing again, but blushing also.
“I know she understood what I meant, when I would ride eighty miles on horseback for the pleasure of serenading her. To do that, or jump aboard the steamer after it is under way, means about the same thing, I think.”
Don Mariano kept talking in that strain until Clarence recovered his composure.