"Love me to-day,
Love me an hour;"
sang Lolita, and his eyes turned to the two at the gate, still chaperoned by the faithful parrot. In them was a flash like fire on steel, as they rested on Bob Flick. Then he turned again to Mrs. Gallito. "Forget it," he said again, as he rose to take his leave; "and believe that I have, too."
But his musings on his way back to the hotel would certainly not have proved calming to that lady could she have but known them.
"Gosh!" he muttered, "and I thought it had broke, this blessed blind luck of mine, when I heard 'em mention Colina; but it's holding after all, it's holding. I guess what I know now about the whereabouts of Crop-eared José just about offsets anything Pop Gallito may know about me and anything that Mr. Bob Flick can discover."
CHAPTER III
Pearl's father came the next day, an older man than Hanson had imagined and of a different type. There was no smack of the circus ring about him, no swagger of the footlights; nor any hint of the emotional, gay temperament supposed to be the inheritance of southern blood. He was a saturnine, gnarled old Spaniard with lean jaws and beetling brows. His skin was like parchment. It clung to his bones and fell in heavy wrinkles in the hollows of his cheeks and about his mouth; and his dark eyes, fierce as a wild hawk's, were as brilliant and piercing as in youth.
Little resemblance between him, gaunt and stark and seamed as a desert rock, and his tropical blossom of a daughter, and yet, indubitably, Pearl was the child of her father. The secretiveness, the concentrated will, the unfettered individuality of spirit, which protected its own defiant isolation at all costs, the subtlety, the ability to seek sanctuary in indefinitely maintained silence, these were their traits in common.
Hanson, Gallito met with grave and impersonal courtesy which, the former was relieved to feel, held a real indifference. There were many moths ever circling about this glowing flame of a daughter. Gallito accepted that, met them, observed them, and assumed those introspective meditations in which he seemed ever absorbed.
There was evidently an understanding between Pearl and himself, but no show of affection, and what small tenderness of nature the Spaniard possessed appeared to be bestowed upon Hugh.
Grim and silent, sipping a little cognac from a glass on a table by his side, the old man would sit on the porch for an hour at a time listening to the boy playing the piano in the room within.