MacKay roared with laughter and looked significantly past Adam as if this mirth was not wholly due to his presence alone. Some one else seemed implicated. Suddenly Adam turned. Margarita stood there, with face and mien of a tragedy queen, and it seemed to Adam that her burning black eyes did not see anything in the world but him. Then, with one of her swift actions, graceful and lithe, yet violent, she wheeled and fled. “O Lord!” murmured Adam, aghast at the sudden-dawning significance of the case. He had absolutely forgotten Margarita’s existence. Most assuredly she had seen every move of his with her big eyes, and read his mind, too. He could not see the humor of his situation at the moment, but as he took a short cut through the shady mesquites toward his hut, and presently espied Margarita in ambush. What fiendish glee this predicament of his would have aroused in his brother Guerd! Adam, the lofty, the supercilious, had come a cropper at last--such would have been Guerd’s scorn and rapture! Margarita came rushing from the side, right upon him even as he turned. So swiftly she came that he could not get a good look at her, but she appeared a writhing, supple little thing, instinct with fury. Hissing Spanish maledictions, she flung herself upward, and before he could ward her off she had slapped and scratched his face and beat wildly at him with flying brown fists. He thrust her away, but she sprang back. Then, suddenly hot with anger, he grasped her and, jerking her off her feet, he shook her with far from gentle force, and did not desist till he saw that he was hurting her. Letting her down and holding her at arm’s length, he gazed hard at the white face framed by disheveled black hair and lighted by eyes so magnificently expressive of supreme passion that his anger was shocked into wonder and admiration. Desert eyes! Right there a conception dawned in his mind--he was seeing a spirit through eyes developed by the desert. “Margarita!” he exclaimed, “are you a cat--that you----” “I hate you,” she hissed, interrupting him. The expulsion of her breath, the bursting swell of her breast, the quiver of her whole lissom body, all were exceedingly potent of an intensity that utterly amazed Adam. Such a little girl, such a frail strength, such a deficient brain to hold all that passion! What would she do if she had real cause for wrath? “Ah, Margarita, you don’t mean that. I didn’t do anything. Let me tell you.” She repeated her passionate utterance, and Adam saw that he could no more change her then than he could hope to move the mountain. Resentment stirred in him. “Well,” he burst out, boyishly, “if you’re so darned fickle as that I’m glad you do hate me.”