Don Noé answered not. He was impatiently and without discrimination hauling and jerking the clothes from an open portmanteau. Each shirt, pair of trousers, necktie, or waistcoat was raised in air, and slapped fiercely down on the floor with an oath. Don Noé was not a nice old man, and his daughter relished his discomfiture.
"Oh, damn!" he said, for the twentieth time, as he failed of jerking a garment from the confines of a tray, and sat down with precision in an open hat box. Some pretty pink roses thrust their heads reproachfully upward between his knees. There was discernible, from the front, a wicked look of triumph in Don Noé's small eyes. He revelled in the feeling that he was sinking, sinking down upon a bed of soft and yielding straw.
"So I say," concurred Felisa, as the last exclamation left Don Noé's lips. She sprang away from the partition and flew out of the doorway, along the veranda, and into her father's room.
"Get up at once!" she said. "Dad, do you hear? Get up at once. That is my very best, my fascinator! Get up! Do you hear me?"
She stamped her stockinged foot upon the bare floor. The pain of it made her the more angry. Don Noé sank still further, smiling and helpless.
"Get up at once!"
Two of the peons had returned along the outer veranda. They still hoped to receive a reward for their work of the morning. They lounged in at the shutter opening, and looked on with a pleased grin. The disordered room spoke loudly of Don Noé's rage; the crushed flowers and the stamp of the foot, of the Señorita's fury.
Felisa raised her eyes to the ebony faces framed between the lintels. She could not help but note their picturesque background, the yellow green of the great banana spatules, through which the tropic sunshine filtered.
"Come in here, you wretches, both of you! How dare you laugh!"