“Oh, I don’t know—­Jose acted pretty white, himself.  You’ve got to admit that it’s Jose that took the fight out of the crowd.  I’m glad—­” He did not finish the sentence, and they were considerate enough not to insist that he should.

* * * * *

Warm sunlight, and bonfires fallen to cheerless, charred embers and ashes gone gray; warm sunlight, and eyes grown heavy with the weariness of surfeited pleasure.  Bullock carts creaked again, their squealing growing gradually fainter as the fat-jowled senoras lurched home to the monotony of life, while the senoritas drowsed and dreamed, and smiled in their dreaming.

At the corrals, red-lidded caballeros cursed irritably the horses they saddled.  In the patio Don Andres gave dignified adieu to the guests that still lingered.  The harp was shrouded and dumb upon the platform, the oaken floor polished and dark with the night-long slide of slippered feet.  The fiesta was slipping out of the present into the past, where it would live still under the rose-lights of memory.

There was a scurry of little feet in the rose-garden.  A door slammed somewhere and hushed the sound of sobbing.  A senorita—­a young and lovely senorita who had all her life been given her way—­fled to her room in a great rage, because for once her smiles had not thawed the ice which her anger had frozen.

The senorita flung something upon the floor and trampled it with her little slipper-heels; a rose, blood-red and withered, yet heavy with perfume still; a rose, twin to the one upon which the black horse of Jose had set his foot in the arena.  A note she tore in little bits, with fingers that tingled still from the slap she had given to Diego, who had brought it.  She flung the fragments from her, and the writing was fine and feminine in every curve—­her own, if you wish to know; the note she had sent, twenty-four hours before, to her blue-eyed one whom she had decided to forgive.

“Santa Maria!” she gasped, and gritted her teeth afterwards.  “This, then, is what he meant—­that insolent one!  ’After the fiesta will I send the answer’—­so he told that simpering maid who took my letter and the rose.  And the answer, then, is my rose and my letter returned, and no word else.  Madre de Dios!  That he should flout me thus!  Now will I tell Jose to kill him—­and kill him quickly.  For that blue-eyed gringo I hate!” Then she flung herself across her bed and wept.

Let the tender-hearted be reassured.  The senorita slid from sobbing into slumber, and her dreams were pleasant, so that she woke smiling.  That night she sang a love-song to Jose, behind the passion vines; and her eyes were soft; and when young Don Jose pulled her fingers from the guitar strings and kissed them many times, her only rebuke was such a pursing of lips that they were kissed also for their mutiny.

After awhile the senorita sang again, while Jose, his neck held a little to one side because of his hurt, watched her worshipfully, and forgot how much he had suffered because of her.  She was seventeen, you see, and she was lovely to look upon; and as for a heart—­perhaps she would develop one later.