"Caballero! Don Ramon!"
He started. He had been thinking of the woman at that very moment, and there was her voice calling him. He turned about. The broad rose-glow had deepened to the smoky ruby of a Spanish gloaming, as it lingered along the western hill-tops. These last shone, in spite of the glowing darkness, with a limpid and translucent turquoise like that of the distant landscape in a Siennese picture.
"Don Ramon! wait—I would speak with you!"
It was indeed the priest's Manuela who called him, and though his heart hasted forward to Dolóres, and overleaped boundaries as a dog leaps a wall, still he could not refuse Manuela. Had she not brought them together at the first?
"Ah, Manuela, you are kind—there is good news up at the house, is there not? No ill has befallen the little one?"
"What has brought you home so soon?" cried the woman, a touch of impatient eagerness in her tones. "You will frighten Dolóres if you blunder it upon her all unshaven and travel-stained like that. Have you no more sense, when you know——?"
"Know what? I know nothing!" Ramon slurred his speech in his eagerness. "What is there to know?"
Manuela laughed—a little strained sound, as if she had been recovering a shaken equanimity, and was not yet sure of her ground.
"You, so long married—five, six months, is it not so—and yet not to know! But a fool is always a fool, Don Ramon, even if he owns a vineyard and a charming young wife ten times too good for him!"
"Truth of God!" gasped Ramon, with his favourite oath, "but I did not know. I am the father of all donkeys. But what am I to do, tell me, Manuela? I will obey you!"