"She seemed sweet and good. She carried my note, Ana. I must always be her friend. Tell him--"
Escobeda had stolen up softly, and was chuckling to himself outside in the passage.
"Ana has my permission to go and tell him all about how you love him, Muchacha. That will make it even more pleasant for me. I thank you for helping me carry out my plans, but for the present, Ana had better pack your things, and quickly. The sun is getting over to the west, and you must start within two hours' time."
Raquel threw her arms round Ana and strained her to her childish breast.
"You will go, dear Ana, you promise me, do you not? You will go?"
"I will," said the weeping Ana, "even if I must go in my Sunday shoes."
When the voluble Rotiro had vanished round the end of the counting-house, Silencio retired to his inner sanctum and closed and locked the door. The contrast between this room and the bare front office was marked. Here cretonne draped the walls, its delicate white and green relieving the plain white of the woodwork. Coming from the outer glare, the cool coloring was more than grateful to the senses. The large wicker chairs with which the room was furnished were painted white, their cushions being of the same pale green whose color pervaded the interior. The white tables, with their green silken cloths, the white desk, the mirrors with white enameled frames, the white porcelain lamps with green shades, all of the same exquisite tint, made the sanctum a symphony of delicate color, a bower of grateful shade. Pull one of the hangings aside, ever so little, and a fortress stared you in the face--a fortress known of, at the most, to but two persons in the island.
It is true that the more curious of the peons had wondered somewhat why Don Gil had brought down from the es-States those large sheets of iron with clamps and screws; but the native is not inquisitive as a rule, and certainly not for long. All señors do strange things, things not to be accounted for by any known rule of life, and the Señor Don Gil was rich enough to do as he liked. What, then, was it to a hard-working peon, what a grand señor like the Don Gil took into his mahogany house?
The man who had come down in the steamer with the sheets of iron had remained at Palmacristi for a month or more. He had brought two workmen, and when he sailed for Nueva Yorka no one but the owner of the Casa de Caoba and the old Guillermina knew that the inner counting-house had been completely sheathed with an iron lining, whose advent the peons had forgotten.