There was not a face to be seen which you would not confidently have pronounced to be Spanish, if you had met it at the North Pole.
Dick and I sat down at a little table and began to talk in English, while round us on every side the Spanish language--pure Castilian, and slipshod, mellifluous Andaluz--gushed forth like a golden fountain.
Hunger, long unappeased, at first inclined Dick to a cynical view of life in general, and Spanish hotel life in particular, but his temper improved as the meal went on, and he even forgave me for deserting a starving man.
"No sign of the O'Donnels," said he. "Perhaps they've a private dining-room."
"I doubt there's one in the house," said I.
"Well, I'll inquire later," Dick went on. "I've looked at every face here, and--"
Dick reddened. "I hope I haven't been staring," said he; "but she _is_ the ideal Spanish girl, isn't she? If I were an artist, I'd want to paint her." As he spoke, his eyes wandered towards the table next ours, which, since a dish of Spanish peppers, rice, and chicken made a man of him, had monopolized all the attention he could spare from dinner.
I had noticed this; hence my gibe. But Dick was not far wrong about the girl.
Her place at the table put her opposite him; and her companion was a rotund, brown man, with the beaming face of a middle-aged cherub, and the habit of murmuring his contributions to the conversation in an Andalucían voice, with an Andalucían accent mellifluous as Andalucían honey.
The girl herself was true Andaluza, too, though of a very different type from the cherubic person who (Dick hoped) was her father. No such brown stars of eyes ever opened to the world outside Andalucía; nor did any save an Andaluza know, without being taught, how to give such liquid, yet innocent, glances as those, which occasionally sparkled from under her long lashes for Dick, when the Cherub was not looking.
She was a slim young thing, with a heart-shaped face of an engaging olive pallour; a pretty, self-conscious mouth, which changed bewitchingly from moment to moment; and heavy masses of dark hair piled high after the Spanish fashion, as if to suit a mantilla--hair so smooth and glossy that, from a little distance, it had the effect of being carved from a block of ebony.