Chapter 25 - Page 2

I'll manage somehow; so don't worry your pretty head. I'll find the price, if I have to waylay old Don Mario and rob him. Don't you think I look like a bandit? The very sight of me would terrify that fat rascal."

"To me you are beautiful," breathed the girl. Then she lowered her eyes. "La, la! How I spoil you! I have quite forgotten how to be ladylike. Isabel was right when she called me a bold and forward hussy. Now, then, please turn your face aside, for I wish to think, and so long as you look at me I cannot--I make love to you brazenly. See! Now, then, that is much better. I shall hold your hand, so. When I kiss it you may look at me again, for a moment." Drawing herself closer to O'Reilly, Rosa began thoughtfully: "Before you came I more than once was on the point of appealing to some of my former friends, but they are all Spaniards and we are no longer--simpatico, you understand?"

Rosa paused for his answer.

"Perfectly; I'm in the same fix. Of all the people I used to know there isn't one but would denounce me if I made myself known. Now that I've been fighting with the Insurrectos, I daren't even go to the American consul for help--if there is an American consul."

Rosa nodded, then continued, hesitatingly: "I had a vivid dream last night. Perhaps it was a portent. Who knows? It was about that stepmother of mine. You remember how she met her death? I wrote you--"

"Yes, and Esteban also told me."

"It was he who recovered her body from the well. One day, while we were in hiding, away up yonder in the Yumuri, he showed me an old coin--"

"I know," O'Reilly said, quickly. "He told me the whole story. He thinks that doubloon is a clue to your father's fortune, but--I can't put much faith in it. In fact, I didn't believe until this moment that there was a doubloon at all."

"Oh, indeed there was! I saw it."

"Then it wasn't merely a sick fancy of your brother's?"

"Indeed no, it--" Rosa broke off to exclaim, "O'Reilly, you are looking at me!"

"But you gave me the signal to look," he protested.

"Nothing of the sort; you placed your fingers upon my lips." There was a moment of silence during which the lovers were oblivious to all but each other, then Rosa murmured: "How strange! Sometimes your eyes are blue and sometimes gray. Does that mean that your love, too, can change?"

"Certainly not. But come, what about Esteban and that doubloon?"

With an effort the girl brought herself back to earth. "Well, it occurred to me, in the light of that dream last night, that Esteban may have been right. Of course nobody outside of our family credits the old story, and yet my father was considered a very rich man at one time. Pancho Cueto