"Yes," said Hazlitt, half to himself. "She's like a Madonna, a Madonna whom some great man dreamed of painting and gave up in despair."
"Exactly," Doña Ceferina agreed hastily. "That's just it. She's beautiful as the Virgin herself, and good! Poor child, after three years of Paris and Madrid, to come back to this!" She swept an over-jeweled hand at the great, simple, dignified room. "No wonder she's lonely, poor little dear. Go and talk to her, Señor Hasleet."
Hazlitt accepted his permission with alacrity. As he approached, Doña Dolores glanced timidly at him across the gulf of sex, which tradition and training had fixed between her and all male things not of her blood, and retreated into herself. Her shyness was part of her attraction, Hazlitt thought, and did not find the silence awkward as he stood beside her and looked down with her on the hacienda.
In the shaggy village clustered about the squat stone chimney of the mill, groups of girls and young men were laughing and splashing about the wells; from the little groves which embowered the houses, the evening fires glowed red; the light breeze carried, even to that distance, a hint of the pungent wood-smoke. As Hazlitt watched the peaceful scene, all the love of the open which had led him wandering through life rolled over him in a wave.
"Jove, it's a good old world, after all," he said.
The girl glanced up at him quickly. "After all?" she echoed plaintively. "Tell me, señor. The Sisters always said that the world was bad, and we must be afraid of it. When you speak so, saying that it is good, I wonder if you also do not think it is bad. Why isn't it good, if we are happy in it?"
Hazlitt smiled down into her puzzled eyes. Decidedly they were matter-of-fact, these women of the hacienda. "It is good," he assured her, with the calm philosophy of his thirty years behind him. "Of course it's good." Still she looked up at him, forgetting her shyness, and a gust of protectiveness and elder-brotherly affection for this tender, budding woman-thing took hold of him. "It's good," he urged, "and you will always be happy in it."
Back in the dimness Doña Ceferina was sipping her third cup of chocolate, while Raymundo smoked with half shut eyes and smiled inscrutably.
Like Dorcas or Abigail or whoever she was of old, Doña Ceferina sat among her maidens. There were half a dozen of them on the floor, sewing and spinning and chattering in subdued voices, while the mistress of the hacienda sat enthroned in the midst of them. But unlike whoever she was of old, Doña Ceferina had a card-table before her, and on the other side of the table Hazlitt sat, and the two smiled companionably across at each other as they sorted fat bundles of cards.
They were playing panguingui. One plays panguingui with six packs of cards and much patience. Doña Ceferina and Hazlitt had played a good deal of it since they first met, six months before, and Hazlitt's patience had never wearied. Neither had the patience of Señorita Dolores, which is more to the point, for she had to stand behind Hazlitt's chair and help him with the unfamiliar cards. She was standing there now.