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.
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