onvicted," as the revivalists have it, and being moved to
chagrin instead of shame, he carried the story of Andrea's surprising
modesty to Bachelder.

Here was a man of other parts. An artist, he had traced the spinning
meridians over desert and sea, following the fluttering wing of the muse
till she rewarded his deathless hope by pausing for him in this small
Indian town. Expecting to stay a week, he had remained fifteen years,
failing to exhaust in that long time a tithe of its form and color.
Screened by tropical jungle, a mask of dark palms laced with twining
_bejucas_, it sat like a wonderfully blazoned cup in a wide green saucer
that was edged with the purple of low environing hills--a brimming cup
of inspiration. Save where some oaken grill supplied an ashen note, its
adobe streets burned in smoldering rose, purple and gold--the latter
always predominant. It glowed in the molten sunlight, shone in the soft
satin of a woman's skin; the very dust rose in auriferous clouds from
the wooden-wheeled ox-carts. But for its magenta tiling, the pillared
market stood, a huge monochrome, its deep yellows splashed here and
there with the crimson of the female hucksters' dresses. This was their
every-day wear--a sleeveless bodice, cut low over the matchless
amplitudes and so short that the smooth waist showed at each uplift of
the round, bronze arms; a skirt that was little more than a cloth wound
about the limbs; a shawl, all of deep blood color. Small wonder that he
had stayed on, and on, and on, while the weeks merged into months, and
months into years.

He lived in the town's great house, an old feudal hacienda with walls
two yards thick, recessed windows oaken grilled, and a pleasant patio
where the hidalgo could take his ease under cocoanut palms and lemon
trees while governments went to smash without. Here Bachelder was always
to be found in the heat of the day, and here he listened with huge
disgust to Paul's story. Because of their faith, strength and
purity--according to their standards--he had always sworn by the Tewana
women, setting them above all others, and though a frank sinner against
accepted moral codes, he would never have confused nudity with vice.

"Man!" he exclaimed--so loudly that Rosa, his housekeeper, imagined that
something was going wrong again with the painting--"Man! all the dollars
you will ever earn would buy nothing more than her stone! If you want
her, you will have to marry her."

"Oh, d