“Who knows!” said he.
Ramón was coming down the terrace, his fine white serape folded over his naked shoulder, with its blue-and-dark pattern at the borders, and its long scarlet fringe dangling and swaying as he walked. He leaned against one of the pillars of the terrace, and looked down at Kate and Cipriano. Cipriano glanced up with that peculiar glance of primitive intimacy.
“I told the Señora Caterina,” he said, “if ever she wanted to marry a man, she should marry me.”
“It is plain talk,” said Ramón, glancing at Cipriano with the same intimacy, and smiling.
Then he looked at Kate, with a slow smile in his brown eyes, and a shadow of curious knowledge on his face. He folded his arms over his breast, as the natives do when it is cold and they are protecting themselves; and the cream-brown flesh, like opium, lifted the bosses of his breast, full and smooth.
“Don Cipriano says that white people always want peace,” she said, looking up at Ramón with haunted eyes. “Don’t you consider yourselves white people?” she asked, with a slight, deliberate impertinence.
“No whiter than we are,” smiled Ramón. “Not lily-white, at least.”
“And don’t you want peace?” she asked.
“I? I shouldn’t think of it. The meek have inherited the earth, according to prophecy. But who am I, that I should envy them their peace! No, Señora. Do I look like a gospel of peace?—or a gospel of war either? Life doesn’t split down that division, for me.”
“I don’t know what you want,” said she, looking up at him with haunted eyes.