Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/176

 the facility with which he acquired the speech to harmonize with them. He stood before Tula in a fine suit of silver-gray velvet, lacings of gold on his short jacket, tasselings of gold on the green sash. His own skin was not tighter on his thighs than his pantaloons, cut with flaring bottoms which almost covered his boots and strapped under the instep, in the fashion that was best suited to men who lived more than half their time in the saddle. A little trickling-down of hair from the temple made a narrow band of beard, which was cut square-ended midway of his cheek, in the true Castilian way. He was a supple, sinewy, brown and comely man.

Tula laid aside the linen that she had held in her lap, and came to the door, a thimble on her finger, scissors hanging like a crucifix on a black braid about her neck.

"You would look in at my class, Don Juan?" said she.

How could Doña Magdalena ever think of so gross a comparison for the delicate tint that ran, like a shadow over a fair land, from throat to cheeks as she spoke. Measles! scorned Juan. It was the impalpable pigment of sunset above the hills; the elusive beauty of the sweetest bloom.

"I will include the class," said he, but he could not have sworn, on the word of a true man, that Tula was keeping a class that day. There was Tula in the door. A man's vision fused upon her radiance; it faltered like a dying beam at the window of her eyes.