"Don't let me interrupt your game," he said. "It is early yet, and if Miss Gallito isn't too tired, and if she will let me, I will talk to her while you play."
José smiled to himself and picked up the cards. The game went on. Seagreave, receiving no encouragement from Pearl, made no attempt at conversation, until at last, stirred by some impulse of curiosity, she lifted her eyes. It was this question of age she wished to decide. In that first, quick glance of hers she had taken it for granted that he was twenty, but in a second stolen look she had noted certain lines about the mouth and eyes which added years to his blonde youthfulness. Then her quick ear had caught José's "Saint Harry," and to her, who knew many men, those lines about mouth and eyes did not suggest a past of saintship.
Her surreptitious glance encountered that of Seagreave, for he, too, had withdrawn his eyes from the fire for a moment to let his puzzled gaze rest upon her. He had known vaguely that Gallito had a daughter, and he remembered in the same indefinite way that some one had told him that she was an actress, but, even so, he could not reconcile this—his mind sought a simile to express her—this exotic, with Gallito, these two mountain women, a mountain cabin, and an equally unpretentious home in the desert. She lay listlessly in her chair, a long and slender shape in a dull black gown which fell about her in those statuesque folds which all drapery assumed immediately she donned it; beneath it showed her feet in black satin slippers and the gleam of the satin seemed repeated in her blue-black hair. Her cheek was unwontedly pale. A monotone she appeared, half-within and half-without the zone of the firelight; but the individuality of her could not be thus subdued. It found expression in the concentration of light and color focused in the splendid rings which sparkled on the long, brown fingers of both her hands.
Her narrow eyes met his sombrously. On either side it was a glance of curiosity, of scrutiny. She, as usual, made no effort to begin a conversation, and he, searching for a polite commonplace, said presently:
"Have you ever been in Colina before?"
"Often, but not in the last two years," she answered tonelessly, "not since you've been here, I guess. I hate the mountains."
"I have been here nearly two years," he vouchsafed, "and I feel as if I would never go away. But you live in the desert, don't you?"
"Sometimes, that is, when I'm not out on the road. The desert is the place. You can breathe there, you can live there," there was a passionate vibration in her voice, "but these old, cold mountains make you feel all the time as if they were going to fall on you and crush you."
"Do they make you feel that way?" He pulled his chair nearer to her so that his back was turned to the two men, and José, who saw everything, smiled faintly, mordaciously. "How strange!" It was not a conventional expression, he seemed really to find it strange, unbelievably so.
"And you, how do they make you feel?" she asked wearily, a touch of scorn in her glance.