"You seem to have forgotten that not all Spaniards are black. There are
some among them as fair as you are. The 'princess,' as you call her,
has hair about the color of yours, and her eyes are blue, even bluer
than yours. But I don't see what interest you can have in her. I didn't
marry her."
"But you may go back there--wherever it is--and correct that dreadful
mistake."
"In that case I should first be obliged to murder her present husband.
Perhaps I omitted to tell you last night that she was very successfully
married to a wealthy young coffee planter, just before I left Trujillo."
"Well, you wouldn't let a little thing like that stop you if you wanted
to go back, would you?"
"Oh, no; certainly not. Don Jesus Maria Diego de Traviano would
probably do the stopping act--with a soft-nosed bullet. He is a crack
shot with a Mauser, as I happen to know."
"Poor you!" she murmured. Then, with the lightning-like change of front
which had been one of her chief attractions--for me--in the old days:
"Why don't you quarrel?--say something that I'll have to get mad and
bitter at?"
I turned to face her and the sheer beauty of her shook me. Yet I did
contrive to strike back, after a fashion.
"The voyage is yet young. There will doubtless be many quarrelsome
occasions. Just now I don't think of anything more vital than this:
if you are meaning to keep Jerry Dupuyster in hand, you are going the
wrong way about it. If you seem to prefer my company to his, I have an
idea that he would be just Quixotic enough to let you have your own
way."
"Thanks, awfully," she laughed, but behind the laugh the slate-blue
eyes were saying things out of a very different vocabulary. "That will
do very nicely for a beginning. I suppose I shall have to give Jerry a
few lessons in the proper reactions. Isn't that the tinkle-tinkle of
the dinner gong?"
It was; and a few minutes later our ship's company, lacking only Miss
Mehitable, who was still confined to her stateroom, gathered for the
first time as a whole around the long table in the dining-saloon of
the _Andromeda_. And in the seating I took blessed good care to have
Beatrice Van Tromp on my left and motherly Mrs. Sanford for a bulwark
on my right.