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uncovered, she was not very eager to begin. They made her feel like an intruder. She did not pause to realise that she was one.

“We don’t meet in your Morning Star, apparently, do we!” she said, mocking, but with a slight quaver.

A deeper seemed suddenly to hold the two men.

“And I suppose a woman is really de trop, even there, when two men are together.”

But she faltered a bit in the saying. Cipriano, she knew, was baffled and stung when she taunted him.

Ramón answered her, with the gentleness that could come straight out of his heart: but still in Spanish:

“Why, Cousin, what is it?”

Her lip quivered, as she suddenly said:

“I don’t really want to go away from you.”

Ramón looked swiftly at Cipriano, then said:

“I know you don’t.”

But the gentle protective tone of his voice only made Kate rebel again. She brimmed over with sudden tears, crying:

“You don’t really want me.”

“Yes, I want you!—Verdad! Verdad!” exclaimed Cipriano, in his low, secret, almost muttering voice.

And even amid her tears, Kate was thinking to herself: What a fraud I am! I know all the time it is I who don’t altogether want them. I want myself to myself. But I can fool them so that they shan’t find out.

For she heard the hot, phallic passion in Cipriano’s voice.

Then came the voice of Ramón, like a chill:

“It is you who don’t want,” he said, in English this time. “You needn’t commit yourself to us. Listen to your own best desire.”

“And if it tells me to go away?” she flashed, defiant through the end of her tears.

“Then go! Oh certainly go!”

Suddenly her tears came afresh.

“I knew you didn’t really want me,” she wept.

Then Cipriano’s voice said, with a hot, furtive softness of persuasion:

“You are not his! He would not tell you!”

“That is very true,” said Ramón. “Don’t listen to me!”