"And may not cousins kiss?" asked Beltran. "Those wires were placed there to prevent the little child whom we--I--expected from falling into the river. You are scarce larger than the little child--whom we--I--pictured, but oh! how infinitely more sweet!"
He twisted one long brown finger in the ring of hair which strayed downward nearly to her eyes. Felisa withdrew her head with a quick motion. She was experiencing a mixture of feelings. She had come here to San Isidro with a purpose, and now, within two short hours of her arrival, she found that her purpose marched with her desires. Don Noé had said, "Felisa, do you remember your Cousin Beltran, your mother's nephew?"
"No, papa, how could I remember him? I never saw him. I have seldom heard of him."
"Ah, yes, I know," returned Don Noé, with the sudden awakening of the semi-centenarian to the fact that he is communing with a second generation. "Well, that wretched old grandfather of yours, old Balatrez, cut your mother off because she married _me_!"
"Had he seen the hat boxes?" asked Felisa, who had a humour of her own.
"Don't be impertinent. All that fine property has gone to Beltran, just because your mother married _me_! She was sister to Beltran's mother, your aunt, as you know. Now, Felisa, I intend to have that fortune back."
"How, papa? Do you intend to call upon my cousin to stand and deliver?"
Felisa considered a shrinkage from eighteen to eight new gowns a summer a distinct sign of poverty. When Don Noé drew in his horns as to expenditures, the young foreign attaché who had all but proposed to him for the hand of Felisa relaxed his attentions. Felisa had hoped to be a countess, but a title is no guarantee of perennial or even annual bread and butter, and those indispensable articles some one must provide. At the close of Don Noé's remarks, which were too extended to be repeated, Felisa had said, "I am quite ready for your cousin-hunt, papa."
A feeling akin to shame swept through her as she sat there and recalled this conversation, and realized what this new intimacy with Beltran meant to her--what it might mean in the days to come, for that he loved her at once and irrevocably her vanity gave her no chance to doubt, and she knew now that she was beginning to find this impetuous lover more than attractive. One who knew Felisa thoroughly would have said that she was beginning to care for him as much as it was in her nature to care for any one but herself.