"That is Elena--beside Gervasio." She indicated a young woman with soft, patient, brown eyes, the dignity of her race and the sweetness of young motherhood, who would have looked little older than herself had it not been for an already shape-less figure. "I can take you to-morrow to see them if you wish."
She had cast down her eyes and her face was white. Still he groped on.
"Pardon me if I say that I am surprised your parents should permit such a woman as this Rosa to attend you. Why should your happy life be dis-turbed by the lamentations of an abandoned crea-ture--who can do you no good, and possibly much harm?"
Still Concha did not raise her eyes. "I do not think poor Rosa would do anyone harm. But per-haps it were as well she went elsewhere. We have had her long enough. I have taken a dislike to her.
I reproach myself bitterly, but I cannot help it. I should like never to see her again."
"What has she told you?" Concha glanced up swiftly. His eyes were blazing. She felt quite cer-tain that he rolled a Russian oath under his tongue, and she made a slight involuntary motion toward him, her lips trembling apart.
"Nothing," she murmured. "I do not know--I do not know. But I no longer wish her near me.
She--life is very strange and terrible, senor. You know it well--I, so little."
Rezanov felt his breath short and his hands cold.
For a moment he made no reply. Then he smiled charmingly and said in the conventional tone that was ever at his command: "Of course you know little of life in this Arcadia. One who hopes to be numbered among the best of your friends prays that you never may. Yes, senorita, life is strange --strangely commonplace and disillusionizing--but sometimes picturesque. Believe me when I say that nothing stranger has ever befallen me than to find out here on the lonely brink of a continent nearly twenty thousand versts from Europe, a girl of six-teen with the grand manner, and an intellect with-out the detestable idiosyncrasies of the fashionable bas bleus I have hitherto had the misfortune to en-counter."
She was tapping the table slowly with her fork, and he noted that her soft, childish mouth was set.
"No doubt you are quite right to put me off," she said finally, and in a voice as even as his own. "And my intellect would do me little good if it did not teach me to ignore mysteries I can never hope to fathom. There is no such thing as life in your sense in this forgotten corner of the world, nor ever will be in my time. If you come back and visit us twenty years hence you will find me fat and worn like Elena, and busy every minute like my mother --unless, indeed, I marry Don Weeliam Sturgis and become a great lady in Boston. It would not be so mean a fate."
Rezanov darted a look of angry contempt at the pale young man who was eating little and miser-ably watching the handsome pair at the head of the table. "You will not marry him!" he said briefly.
"I could do far worse." Concha's lashes framed an adorable glance that sent the blood to the hair of the sensitive youth. "You have no idea how clever and good he is. And--Madre de Dios!--I am so tired of California."
"But you are a part of it--the very symbol of its future, it seems to me. I wish I had a sculptor in my suite. I should make him model you, label the statue 'California,' and erect it on the peak of that big island out there."
"That is very poetical, but after all, you are only saying that I am a pretty savage with an education that will be more common in the next generation.
It is little consolation for an existence where the most exciting event in a lifetime is the arrival of a foreign ship or the inauguration of a governor."
And once more she smiled at Sturgis. He raised his glass impulsively, and she hers in gay response. A moment later she gave the signal to leave the table.
Rezanov followed her back to the sala chewing the cud of many reflections.
