The Travelling ThirdsAtherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
General
The Travelling Thirds
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
Americans -- Spain -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
For the first time her eyes fell before his. She turned away abruptly.
“You are very good,” she said. “Come up-stairs and meet the señora and
her daughter. They are charming people.”
A few moments later, as they were standing on the balcony, she said to
him: “They are taking me to the bull-fight this afternoon. Shall you
go?”
“Possibly. But I am surprised that you wish to go. It is a beastly
exhibition and no place for you.”
“I am going,” she said, imperturbably. “It is a part of Spain, and I
should as soon think of missing a religious festival like this. Besides,
I have seen bull-fights in southern California. You may as well come
with us. Of course, Cousin Lyman is not going.”
“Probably not. Very well, I will go with you, if your friends will have
me. I must lunch at the hotel with the Moultons and set their minds at
rest; but it is an hour until then. Would you care to walk about the
streets and see the crowd?”
The Señora Villéna was very large and the day was warm, but she amiably
consented to walk as far as the cathedral in the wake of her guest.
“I have not been out alone since I came to her,” said Catalina, with a
sigh, as she walked beside Over up the street. “At Granada I know of a
pension, and liberty will be sweet again.”
Over’s eyes twinkled as he looked at the face between the soft edges of
the mantilla.
“Your new rôle is vastly becoming. I had no idea that two days of
Old-World discipline could effect such a change. You look as if you had
always walked with a duenna at your heels.”
“So I have, nearly always. I never was on the street alone in my life
until my mother died. You think me improved?” she added, quickly.
“I did not say that.”
“I have always thought your bluntness the best thing about you—I like
the short skirt and covert coat best,” she said, defiantly.
“They do very well to disguise you on the train; but if I never saw you
again I should prefer to remember you as you are now—or as you were that
night in Tarragona. You hardly deserve your beauty, you know.”
And then, in a new spirit of coquetry, born perhaps of the mantilla,
into whose silken mesh many a dream no doubt had flowed, she lifted her
chin, dropped her eyelashes for a second, flashed him a swift personal
glance. Before he could adjust himself to the new phase, however, she
had dismissed it and remarked that she hoped not to meet the Moultons;
and, unaccountably perturbed, he replied that they were sure to be
fatigued and resting for luncheon.
It would have been easy to avoid them in the dense crowd packed into the
plaza before the cathedral, waiting for the procession to pass. Over and
Catalina paused a few moments to look at the superb gobelins with which
the façade of the cathedral was hung, and then ran the gamut of the
beggars and entered the cloister.
“I shall go into the Chapel of the Incarnacion and pray,” said the
Señora Villéna, “and meet you here in half an hour—no?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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