A bleak smile wrinkled Gallito’s parchment-like cheeks.  “And to whom do you pray, Jose, your patron saint, or rather sinner, the Devil?”

Jose looked shocked.  “You are a blasphemer, Gallito,” he reproved, and then added piously, “I say my prayers each day that I may, by example, help Saint Harry.”

“And why is Harry in need of your example?” said Gallito, holding up his glass between himself and the fire and watching the deep reflections of ruby light in the amber liquid.

“It goes against me to see an unequal struggle,” sighed Jose.  “He is hanging on desperately to his ice-peak, but the Devil has almost succeeded in clawing him off.”

Gallito frowned.  “This talk of yours is nonsense, Jose; but if there is anything in it, Harry may understand that any interest he may have in my daughter can lead to nothing.  She is a dancer before she is anything else, it is in her blood.  Harry does not and never can understand her; only one of her own kind can do that.  He is by nature a religious; his cabin is the cell of a monk.”

Again Jose’s eerie, malicious laughter echoed through the room.

“Aye, laugh,” growled Gallito; “but you see my daughter for the first time.  You think because she smiles at Harry that she loves him; you think because she is the only woman he talks to that he loves her; you do not know her.  She is young, she is beautiful and a dancer.  She has had many lovers ever since she put her hair up, and learned how she could make a fool of a man with her eyes and her smile, and she has made them pay toll.  She always did that from the first.”  There was a note of fierce pride in his harsh, brief laughter.  “Yes, she would smile and promise anything with her eyes, but she gave nothing.  It is strange”—­the old Spaniard, his austere spirit mellowed by his excellent cognac, fell into a mood of confidential musing, an indulgence which he rarely permitted himself—­“that Hugh, the child of a woman I never saw, reaches my heart more than my own daughter does.  But Pearl is a study to me.  I say to myself, ’She cares for nothing but money, applause, admiration,’ and yet, even while I say it, I am not sure; I do not know, I do not know.”

Again he admired the glints of firelight reflected in his cognac glass.  “But this I do know, Jose, she is an actress before she is anything else.”

Jose leered knowingly.  “You think only of your daughter,” he said.  “What about Saint Harry?  He has mad blood in him, too.  It is only a few years that he has been a saint; before that the Devil held full sway over him.  And,” he added pensively, after a moment’s cogitation, “there are many lessons one learns from the Devil.”

“You should know,” returned Gallito, with his twisting, sardonic smile.

“Ah, the Devil is not all bad,” said Jose defensively.  “One can learn from him the lesson of perseverance, and perseverance is a virtue.”