"Don't be impertinent. All that fine property has gone to Beltran, just because your mother married me! She was sister to Beltran's mother, your aunt, as you know. Now, Felisa, I intend to have that fortune back."
"How, papa? Do you intend to call upon my cousin to stand and deliver?"
"I intend you to do that, Felisa."
"I am tired of being poor, too, papa."
Felisa considered a shrinkage from eighteen to eight new gowns a summer a distinct sign of poverty. When Don Noé drew in his horns as to expenditures, the young foreign attaché who had all but proposed to him for the hand of Felisa relaxed his attentions. Felisa had hoped to be a countess, but a title is no guarantee of perennial or even annual bread and butter, and those indispensable articles some one must provide. At the close of Don Noé's remarks, which were too extended to be repeated, Felisa had said, "I am quite ready for your cousin-hunt, papa."
A feeling akin to shame swept through her as she sat there and recalled this conversation, and realized what this new intimacy with Beltran meant to her—what it might mean in the days to come, for that he loved her at once and irrevocably her vanity gave her no chance to doubt, and she knew now that she was beginning to find this impetuous lover more than attractive. One who knew Felisa thoroughly would have said that she was beginning to care for him as much as it was in her nature to care for any one but herself.
XIV
Agueda saw all the plans which they had made together for the coming of the little child carried out by Beltran alone. She could not accompany Don Beltran and his cousin upon their different expeditions; she could not go as an equal, she would not go as an inferior. Besides which, there was never any question as to her joining them. The bull rides, the search for mamey apples, the gathering of the aguacate pears, all of which she had suggested, were taken part in by two only; so was the lingering upon the river, until Agueda shuddered to think of the miasmata which arise after nightfall and envelop the unwary in their unseen though no less deadly clutches. The walks in the moonlight, ending in a lingering beneath the old mahogany tree for a few last confidences before the return to the home-light of the casa, left no place for a third member, because of the close intimacy which naturally was part and parcel of the whole.