"
Yes, it was the old Enriquez; but he seemed graver,--if I could use that
word of one of such persistent gravity; only his gravity heretofore had
suggested a certain irony rather than a melancholy which I now fancied I
detected. And what was this "something else" he was to "tell me later"?
Did it refer to Mrs. Saltillo? I had purposely waited for him to speak
of her, before I should say anything of my visit to Carquinez Springs.
I hurried through my ablutions in the hot water, brought in a bronze jar
on the head of the centenarian handmaid; and even while I was smiling
over Enriquez's caution regarding this aged Ruth, I felt I was getting
nervous to hear his news.
I found him in his sitting-room, or study,--a long, low apartment with
small, deep windows like embrasures in the outer adobe wall, but glazed
in lightly upon the veranda. He was sitting quite abstractedly, with a
pen in his hand, before a table, on which a number of sealed envelopes
were lying. He looked SO formal and methodical for Enriquez.
"You like the old casa, Pancho?" he said in reply to my praise of its
studious and monastic gloom.
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