And that was the kind of magic the girl Paquita practiced in secret down on the tiny beach by the oleander-arcaded pool. Her execration solemnly concluded, the beautiful and youthful dealer in the warlockry of the Roms became again a hot wind of action. Swiftly she ran to the pool, filled her cupped hands with water, and as swiftly came back again.
The fires had died down into twin nests of coals. She cast no water upon them. What water she carried in her cupped hands, she threw upon that little sand image which resembled a man.
Without pausing to watch the havoc she played with her handiwork, she repeated the action, this time throwing water upon the little effigy which looked vaguely like a woman. Then, her midnight-black hair falling about her face and her dusky eyes burning from beneath the obscuring oily threads with a strange sibylline fire, she crouched on her brown bare heels before the two sodden hillocks of sand.
Now, when standing upright, the two little images of sand had seemed mated divinities, bound together by a common majesty. In their downfall and watery ruin, however, one might say that they had become antagonized; there was that in the way they fell which suggested a coldness between them, a rift, a void. In melting and crumbling, the two watersoaked little images had fallen gently away from each other.
Paquita got up and shook back the hair from her face. Her face was flushed, her eyes glowing with glad triumph. She laughed long and arrantly.
"It is written in the sands!" she exclaimed. "She will never have Jacinto Quesada for her bridegroom. It is written; it has been shown to me! Never will those two lie down together on the bed of marriage! And a plague—even that hideous plague I asked for—shall come upon them; a plague of low fevers and cramps of the stomach; a plague that shall color their bodies blue and purple!"
CHAPTER XVI
Hypnosis is an abnormal cerebral state that soon wears off. As one who wakes from a sleep or a spell, the girl Paquita now stretched her arms wide, blinked her eyes, and looked swiftly over her shoulders and this way and that.
Then slowly, her head bowed in thought, her brow knotted in a little puzzled frown, she walked to where lay rumpled on the sand her ocean-green Spanish gown. She slipped into it, returned, stamped into the beach the debris of the two images and then clambered up the rocks. She left the watercourse behind, and neared the camp of the Gitanos.