“Tell her,” prompted Jones, devouring the star-like face, set in its frame of jetty ringlets, “tell her I am going to walk around the plaza. Ask her if she is going.”
“She says she cannot to go this night,” was the translation he received. “She ees painful.”
“Well—er—tell her—er—”
“That you go to dream of her, you theenk of her alone only?” suggested the accommodating Francisco.
“Yes, and—er—tell her that I—that we—will talk again. Tell her that—will you, Francisco?”
After Francisco had conveyed this expression in its proper form, with all the courtesy of the occasion, the two retired—Francisco to the cocina, where the dishes were waiting to be washed, Jones to promenade in the plaza and swing his cane to the music of La Paloma. Visions of further conversations with the distracting beauty flitted before him as he strolled under the orange trees—visions wherein the useful Francisco figured not at all; wherein he saw himself holding a little rose-leaf hand and uttering sweet nothings which needed neither bad Spanish nor broken English for their interpretation.
Jones was shocked, to say the least; and for a moment he could hardly catch his breath, much less command the attention of the lovers. There they were, two of them—in fact, it usually takes two to complete such a scene. The young Romeo was leaning against the bars of her casement window, his face upturned to hers; their hands were clasped through the grating, their heads were close together, and every now and then Jones thought he saw—
It was an ideal scene—to the participants—re-acted there in the moonlight from some Shakespearean play, till Jones rang down the curtain with a laugh of ominous portent. For one of the lovers was Francisco and the other—well, the other was the landlord’s daughter.
“Hello, there, Francisco, you rascal—what are you doing there?” Jones demanded. It was eleven o’clock and Jones had just returned from the plaza.
Francisco turned quickly, dropped the little hand held in his own, said something of sinister sound in Spanish which could hardly be translated into English, then—“Eet ees you, ees eet, señor?—so surpreesed am I! I—I was—how the Engleesh?—hold hands weeth the señorita, ees eet not?”