“Then I have make her laugh?” he said coolly.

I don’t think he had; but I shrugged my shoulders.

“Bueno!” he said cheerfully.  “Lofe, he begin with a laugh, he make feenish with a sigh.”

I turned to look at him in the moonlight.  His face presented its habitual Spanish gravity—­a gravity that was almost ironical.  His small black eyes had their characteristic irresponsible audacity—­the irresponsibility of the vivacious young animal.  It could not be possible that he was really touched with the placid frigidities of Miss Mannersley.  I remembered his equally elastic gallantries with Miss Pinkey Smith, a blonde Western belle, from which both had harmlessly rebounded.  As we walked on slowly I continued more persuasively:  “Of course this is only your nonsense; but don’t you see, Miss Mannersley thinks it all in earnest and really your nature?” I hesitated, for it suddenly struck me that it was really his nature.  “And—­hang it all!—­you don’t want her to believe you a common buffoon., or some intoxicated muchacho.”

“Intoxicated?” repeated Enriquez, with exasperating languishment.  “Yes; that is the word that shall express itself.  My friend, you have made a shot in the center—­you have ring the bell every time!  It is intoxication—­but not of aguardiente.  Look!  I have long time an ancestor of whom is a pretty story.  One day in church he have seen a young girl—­a mere peasant girl—­pass to the confessional.  He look her in her eye, he stagger”—­here Enriquez wobbled pantomimically into the road—­“he fall!”—­he would have suited the action to the word if I had not firmly held him up.  “They have taken him home, where he have remain without his clothes, and have dance and sing.  But it was the drunkenness of lofe.  And, look you, thees village girl was a nothing, not even pretty.  The name of my ancestor was—­”

“Don Quixote de La Mancha,” I suggested maliciously.  “I suspected as much.  Come along.  That will do.”

“My ancestor’s name,” continued Enriquez, gravely, “was Antonio Hermenegildo de Salvatierra, which is not the same.  Thees Don Quixote of whom you speak exist not at all.”

“Never mind.  Only, for heaven’s sake, as we are nearing the house, don’t make a fool of yourself again.”

It was a wonderful moonlight night.  The deep redwood porch of the Mannersley parsonage, under the shadow of a great oak—­the largest in the Encinal—­was diapered in black and silver.  As the women stepped upon the porch their shadows were silhouetted against the door.  Miss Mannersley paused for an instant, and turned to give a last look at the beauty of the night as Jocasta entered.  Her glance fell upon us as we passed.  She nodded carelessly and unaffectedly to me, but as she recognized Enriquez she looked a little longer at him with her previous cold and invincible curiosity.  To my horror Enriquez began instantly to affect a slight tremulousness of gait and a difficulty of breathing; but I gripped his arm savagely, and managed to get him past the house as the door closed finally on the young lady.