“You must advise me,” said the girl. “You must help me.”
She raised her clasped hands higher. She regarded him wistfully, “Won’t you?” she begged.
Her attack had been swift, masterly; every feminine weapon had been brought into effective action; and the surrender of Roddy was sudden, and complete. In abject submission he proceeded incoherently:
“My dear young lady!” he cried. “But, my dear young lady!”
He was rewarded with a brilliant, blinding smile.
“Then you will help me?” Inez asked.
Roddy recovered himself quickly.
“My Spanish is very bad,” he answered, “but what it sounds like in English is, ‘I am at your feet.’”
The sun now was shining brightly, and in the open road they were as conspicuous as though they had stood in a shop window on Broadway. Across the road, in the hedge opposite, a gate barred a path that led into one of the plantations. Roddy opened the gate, and together, followed by Pedro with the ponies, they found a spot where they were hidden by the hedge from any one passing on the highway. Inez halted in the shade of one of the orange trees. Speaking rapidly, she sketched for Roddy a brief history of the various efforts that had been made to rescue her father. She explained why these efforts had failed. She told him of the revolution led by Pino Vega, and the good it was expected to accomplish.
At first the girl spoke in some embarrassment. She knew that to be where she was, at that hour, alone with a stranger, was, in the eyes of her friends and family, an unpardonable offense. And though she resented their point of view, the fact that it existed disquieted her. But the man at her side did not seem to consider talking to a girl in the open sunshine either as a novel experience or one especially disgraceful. Politely, with lowered eyes, he gave to what she said the closest attention. The circumstance that they were alone, even the fact that she was young and attractive, did not once appear to occur to him. Seeing this, Inez with each succeeding moment gained confidence in Roddy and in herself and spoke freely.