"You would thank me better if you were to set off in a swinging gallop over those sun-baked, oven-like sand-hills, and so stave off a chill! For the rest, I am Mr. Poinsett, one of your late husband's legal advisers, here on business that will most likely bring us together--I trust much more pleasantly to you than this. Good morning!"
He had already mounted his horse, and was lifting his hat. Donna Maria was not a very clever woman, but she was bright enough to see that his business _brusquerie_ was either the concealment of a man shy of women, or the impertinence of one too familiar with them. In either case it was to be resented.
How did she do it? Ah me! She took the most favourable hypothesis. She pouted, I regret to say. Then she said--
"Why, if you hadn't stood there, looking at me and criticising, I shouldn't have tried to go round."
With this Parthian arrow she dashed off, leaving her rescuer halting between a bow and a smile.
When Arthur Poinsett, after an hour's rapid riding over the scorching sand-hills, finally drew up at the door of the Mission Refectory, he had so far profited by his own advice to Donna Maria as to be quite dry, and to exhibit very little external trace of his late adventure. It is more remarkable perhaps that there was very little internal evidence either. No one who did not know the peculiar self-sufficiency of Poinsett's individuality would be able to understand the singular mental and moral adjustment of a man keenly alive to all new and present impressions, and yet able to dismiss them entirely, without a sense of responsibility or inconsistency. That Poinsett thought twice of the woman he had rescued--that he ever reflected again on the possibilities or natural logic of his act--during his ride, no one who thoroughly knew him would believe. When he first saw Mrs. Sepulvida at the Point of Pines, he was considering the possible evils or advantages of a change in the conservative element of San Antonio; when he left her, he returned to the subject again, and it fully occupied his thoughts until Father Felipe stood before him in the door of the refectory. I do not mean to say that he at all ignored a certain sense of self-gratulation in the act, but I wish to convey the idea that all other considerations were subordinate to this sense. And possibly also the feeling, unexpressed, however, by any look or manner, that if _he_ was satisfied, everybody else ought to be.