self round to face him. "Is it so you would have it, sir?"
she asked, and looked bewitching.

"My dear," said Manvers, "you are a beauty." Shall he be blamed if he
kissed her? Not by me, since she never blamed him.

Her clear-seeing eyes searched his face; her kissed mouth looked very
serious, and also very pure. Then, as he observed her ardently, she
coloured and looked down, and afterwards turned herself the way they
were to go, and with a little sigh settled into his arm.

Manvers spurred his horse, and for some time nothing was said between
them. But he was of a talkative habit, with a trick of conversing with
himself for lack of a better man. He asked her if he was forgiven, and
felt her answer on his arm, though she gave him none in words. This
was not to content him. "I see that you will not," he said, to tease
her. "Well, I call that hard after my stoning. I had believed the
ladies of Spain kinder to their cavaliers than to grudge a kiss for a
cartload of stones at the head. Well, well, I'm properly paid. Laws
go as kings will, I know. God help poor men!" He would have gone on
with his baiting had she not surprised him.

She turned him a burning face. "Caballero, caballero, have done!" she
begged him. "You rescued me from worse than death--and what could I
deny you? See, sir, I have lived fifteen, seventeen years in the
world, and nobody--nobody, I say--has ever done me a kindness before.
And you think that I grudge you!" She was really unhappy, and had to
be comforted.

They became close friends after that. She told him her name was
Manuela, and that she was Valencian by birth. A Gitana? No, indeed.
She was a Christian. "You are a very bewitching Christian, Manuela,"
he told her, and drew her face back, and kissed her again. I am told
that there's nothing in kissing, once: it's the second time that
counts. In the very act--for eyes met as well as lips--he noticed that
hers wavered on the way to his, beyond him, over the road they had
travelled; and the ceremony over, he again asked her why. She passed
it off as before, saying that she had looked at nothing, and begged him
to go forward.

Ahead of them now, through the crystalline flicker of the heat, he saw
the dark rim of the wood, the cork forest of La Huerca for which he was
looking, and which hid the river from his aching eyes. No foot-burnt
wanderer in Sahara ever hailed his oasis with heartier thanksgiving;
but it was stil