Look here!" she said, suddenly darting over and drawing it out, and
then practising with it, laughing all the while, at various spots on the
walls of the room, which she hit every time to a nicety.

"You were frightened--confess that you were," she said, teasingly,
sitting down opposite to him, heated with the exercise she had gone
through. She gazed into his face with her cheek resting on her hand and
her elbow on the table. "You were afraid; and now you are angry. The
women in your country don't do such things!"

Salve turned to her with a look of icy rebuff. "No, senorita," he
replied, curtly, and went down into the garden.

Thereupon she seized the guitar again, and began strumming an
accompaniment apparently to her thoughts. It was no longer lively music
she played, but something of a menacing strain, in keeping with the look
in her eyes, and she seemed in a manner to hiss the air through her
teeth.

Later on in the evening she came tripping over to him with a coquettish
smile, and after the custom of the country offered him a cigarette,
which she had begun to smoke herself. When he rather ungallantly
declined it, she exclaimed furiously, stamping her foot--

"Senor!"

But she recovered herself in a moment, and said laughing, with at all
events apparent good-nature, something which meant that she understood
that this might perhaps not be a custom in his country.

Salve felt much relieved when her brother came home, and told him that
the meeting he was waiting for was to take place on the following
evening.

CHAPTER XV.

It was into a badly-lighted tavern, with two or three rooms leading out
of one another, that his friend then conducted him. Men of the most
various social positions, many with a military look, and in
half-threadbare uniforms, filled the inner rooms; and in the outer one
he had seen upon entering a number of seafaring men, who looked like
Americans, and who nodded to him on the strength of his sailor's dress.
There were several women, more or less well dressed, moving about among
them, and others standing with eager faces over the gambling-table in
the inner room. All were drinking acachacas, and the whole place was
pervaded with a cloud of tobacco-smoke, out of which there came a
deafening clamour of talk.

Salve had a seat found for him by his friend at a long table, amongst a
number of bronzed, bearded men, with large hats, leather breeches, and
spurs, whose company he by no m