Peering cautiously through the bushes, he beheld Chiquita and Don Felipe standing facing one another in the same spot where the three women had been but a short time before. He was not near enough to overhear the conversation, but judging from the vehemence of their gestures and high-pitched voices, he rightly conjectured that their meeting was anything but an amicable one.
On seeing Chiquita with Blanch and Bessie, Don Felipe had discreetly refrained from joining them as he had promised; he would make his apologies to them in the evening. The opportunity for which he had been waiting since his return had come—he must see Chiquita alone. So he withdrew to a far corner of the garden, where he could observe the women without being seen, and when Blanch and Bessie returned to the house, he intercepted her. Although she had hourly expected to meet him ever since she had been apprised of his return, his appearance was so sudden she was taken unawares. She had reseated herself after Blanch and Bessie left and sat leaning with one elbow on the table and her head resting in her hand, lost in thought. She did not hear his approach from behind, but at the first sound of his voice she started to her feet, turning like a flash and facing him. Her movement was so sudden and unexpected that he too was taken aback.
"You evidently did not expect to see me this afternoon," he began with some hesitancy.
"I did not," she replied coldly. "I should have thought," she continued, looking him full in the eyes, "that the manhood in you would have forever prevented your return." Felipe winced under her words. A dark flush of anger suffused his face, and his lips quivered in an effort to frame the hot words he was about to utter in reply, but he checked himself.
"One is sometimes forced to follow the bidding of an instinct or desire even against one's will," he said, controlling himself with difficulty. She drew her glove on her right hand without replying and took a step in the direction of the patio, as though to depart.
"Chiquita!" he exclaimed, stepping quickly in front of her and barring her way, "I have tried my best to remain away, but in spite of myself, I've been drawn irresistibly back to you—I could not help it. Besides," he added, "you must realize what it costs me."
"Better had you spared yourself the humiliation, Don Felipe," she answered.
"Listen, Chiquita, to what I have to say!"
"Spare yourself the pain, Don Felipe Ramirez. Nothing you can say can alter my attitude toward you," she interrupted.
"You must hear what I have to say!" he cried passionately, without heeding her impatience. "Ever since we parted, I have done nothing but travel, travel, over the face of the earth, in the vain hope of forgetting you. And if, during that time, I have committed excesses, it was the love of you that drove me to it in order that I might efface you from my memory forever. But, as you see, I cannot do it, and—I have come back again." It was easy to read the agony in his heart, divine the suffering which his humiliation caused him, and yet his words did not move her; not an atom of pity did they arouse within her, knowing as she did the arrogant, selfish being that he was.