Hazlitt broke into her chatter with his thanks, flipped a coin in the air, and jogged on till he had left them far behind, three moving dots on the waste, plodding the way of Malay womenfolk.
Hidden in the green-shrouded wilderness of the lower hills, the Hacienda without a Name lay under the sunset enchanting as a lost fragment of some old world, where labor next the soil was the happiest thing in life. And up in the sala of the great house on the hill, the mistress of the hacienda stared at Hazlitt over her cup. She was a beautiful woman, but under the Caucasian mold of her features another face was beginning to show dimly, the face of a race whose very heat and strength of life fuses all lines down to mere shapelessness of flesh. A part of Doña Ceferina had been overtaken by the unrelenting advance of middle age.
"You say my husband is a prince, Señor?" Doña Ceferina echoed doubtfully over her cup, and her soft forehead wrinkled in bewilderment. This strange young visitor had puzzling notions of what constitutes conversation, a diversion of which Doña Ceferina was extremely fond. "Without doubt," she said, "I think that is a mistake."
Hazlitt looked at her in mingled amusement and vexation. In all his wonderful day of discovery, this talkative, commonplace woman had been the sole jarring note. But Doña Ceferina, oblivious to his emotions, sat in the cool twilight of the big room and poised her cup, like some hybrid goddess of justice about to render a decision.
"Beyond doubt, it is a mistake," said Doña Ceferina. "Don Raymundo's family is one of the oldest in Spain, but it has never married with royalty. There are few princes in Spain not of the royal blood; it is not like Russia." The word gave her a clue to a topic of real interest, and she brightened. "When I was a girl, back at school, I met a Russian prince, one summer at Biarritz—"
Over his cup, Don Raymundo's tiny Mephistophelian moustache lifted slightly in the mocking smile which was his extremest expression of emotion, and Hazlitt rushed to the righting of his false lead.
"Of course I did not mean that Don Raymundo was a prince in name," he explained, "but in fact, you know."
Doña Ceferina raised her cup and sipped her chocolate resignedly, but Hazlitt did not heed her.
"The startling, the wonderful thing to an American like me is that he is not only a prince in power, but a prince of another age. The people here on the plantation are his, belong to him personally. Take that thing we saw just now, for example, all those hundreds of people coming in to the plantation kitchen for their suppers—"
Doña Ceferina rose to her opportunity. "If you only knew," she said, "how much rice it takes to feed five thousand people—"