Part 55

"I am called Elvira Paredes, señorita. And I shall be here--I cannot go for so long, so long, perhaps never."

Flavia leaned forward, her clear eyes questioning.

"You want to go away? To leave this place for some other?"

The confidence came with an outrush of feeling, a wealth of expression and expressive gestures.

"Señorita, to join my betrothed. Ah, there never was one like him, so beautiful, so brave, so constant like the sun in rising! You cannot know. No one can know who has not seen it. And sing! Under my window he would sing until the birds would hush, hush to listen. I have no marriage-portion, I who am an orphan living with the sister of my mother's cousin. Not for that did Luis hesitate. But the time came when he must do military service; serve in Morocco, señorita, serve among savages who would torture him! And to come back poor as he went. So he left. Far away he journeyed, to New York, which is in America, to find peace and make a home."

"Where you will go to him?"

"Señorita, we hope it. He works, I wait. We write long letters. But it is three years. It costs much to cross the ocean, and one grows old." The brown eyes looked the tragedy of hope deferred.

"For men must work and women must weep----" The old refrain came to Flavia. But not this woman, not if her American sister could prevent. And the preventing was so easy! She drew the girl down on the seat beside her, impulsive as Corrie could have been.

"Listen, Elvira--I may call you Elvira? Let me help you. I have so much money, so much more than I can spend, and I am not very happy. Let me think that I have given you what I cannot have; let me send you to Luis. My father will tell us how, he will arrange everything so that you will not have to trouble at all. We will send a message to Luis so that he may meet you."

"Señorita!"

"You will let me? You will not say no? Why, Elvira!"

The girl dropped her face in Flavia's lap and burst into hysterical tears, covering her hands with kisses.

When Mr. Rose returned, half an hour later, this time in the big automobile whose rushing passage stirred whirlwinds of dust on the age-old road, his daughter met him eagerly.

"Papa, I want to send Elvira Paredes to America, to her fiancée. She is a kinswoman of the inn-keeper, here. Will you arrange it for us? I think she would be frightened if you sent her by first-class, but second-class would be very nice. She knows how to go in the train to Malaga, if you get the ticket, and ships sail from there, do they not? Oh, and would you cable to Luis Cárdenas, in New York, so he will know she is coming? I will find the street and number from Elvira."

His children long since had trained Mr. Rose to be surprised at no charming vagaries. He contemplated Flavia, amused, and well pleased with her animation.

"Found something to play with, eh? Very good, we will fix it. But your Elvira will have to wait until I get an answer from her lover through the cable company; I'm sending no girls to New York without knowing they'll land in the right hands. Now, I believe that house up there will suit. We'll have some luncheon and then drive up for you to see it. I like the place, myself. It opens well."

It opened well, if the happiness of Elvira Paredes was a good augury.

"All the rest is from my father," Flavia said, in parting from her. "But take this from me, to wear or for a marriage portion, as you choose."

The gift was a sapphire ring slipped from Flavia's slim finger.

"It resembles the eyes of the señorita; may they always be as bright and clear," fervently returned Elvira, who was an Andalusian and therefore a poet.

"That cost some money, when I bought it," Mr. Rose practically observed, from his seat in the motor-car. "Tell her not to flash it in New York, alone, if she wants to keep it. You can put that into classic Spanish for me, my girl."

That was the beginning of an interlude whose placid monotony was tempered by much equally placid incident. The Americans liked the village, and the village rejoiced in the Americans, so that they came to know each other very well. More than once Flavia thought of the legend of Al-Mansor, and that if one of these days could be deemed happy enough to record by a pearl, the vase could be filled with the gem-chronicles, so much alike were the weeks.

For the white castle on the hill kept its visitors, and so it happened that the summer most crowded and busy of any Corrie ever had known, slipped drowsily by in drowsy Val de Rosas for the two most interested in him.

He never told Flavia what he was doing. The new Corrie Rose was more considerate than the self-centred thoughtlessness of youth had permitted the boy Corrie to be. He would have remembered her anxiety for his safety and dread of danger for him, of himself, but his silence was further impelled by Gerard, who had pointed out--in a few brief sentences that avoided Flavia's name--the responsibility she must feel in keeping such a secret from her father. But, because it was so difficult to write to his "Other Fellow" without telling her all, Corrie's letters came with greater intervals and were less in length.

"I am still touring with Gerard," he wrote to Flavia, in the last note of his that came to Val de Rosas. "Don't mind if my letters come slower, please; I am pretty busy. I guess you will understand what it means to me when I can say that I am doing some work for Gerard and that he calls it good. I wish it cost me more to do. I hope father is well; you didn't say, last time. Keep on writing often, you know, it's the next thing to seeing you."

He wrote that note the night after he broke a track record in California, wrote it on the chiffonier of the hotel bedroom while making ready to attend a motor club dinner at which he was to be chief guest in honor of the day's event. Four weeks later Flavia read it, under the flowering almond trees that surrounded the house so closely as to overhang the balcony on which she sat. Read it, then kissed the careless, boyish Corwin B. Rose that slanted crookedly across the foot of the page. Holding the letter, she sat quite still.

From the room within drifted the voices of Mr. Rose and the mild Father Bartolomé, between whom the last months had established a cordial basis of esteem. The village priest had dined with them; it was in deference to his presence that Flavia wore a gown whose lace collar came up to her round chin, and now had left the two gentlemen to after-dinner conversation instead of herself entertaining her father. She had the sense of being horribly alone; her longing for Corrie became physical pain, so that she crushed the letter in her fingers, catching her breath with difficulty. Close to one another they always had been, still closer together trouble had drawn them, but now half the world stretched its empty spaces between. The impulse that goaded her was to cry out to her father that she must see Corrie--to take her to him--yet she did not speak or move, resolute in endurance. To make that appeal to her father would be to separate Corrie from Allan Gerard, she knew, to bring her brother back to the atmosphere of constraint and reproach to escape which he had left the rose-colored Long Island villa they called home.

"Taxes are taxes," Mr. Rose's raised accents set forth. "Governments have to be maintained. If the tax collector is due to-morrow, Val de Rosas has got to pay up."