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Estenega saw the gleam of a knife and flung Chonita aside, catching the driving arm, the fury of his heart in his muscles. Reinaldo had the soft muscles of the cabellero, and panted and writhed in the iron grasp of the man who forgot that he grappled with the brother of a woman passionately loved, remembered only that he rejoiced to fight to the death the man who had ruined his life.
She learned this morning that it was Diego's determined opposition that kept Reinaldo out of the Departmental Junta, and meets him in no tender frame of mind " Doña Martina raised her hand. Chonita stood in the door-way. She was quite beautiful enough to plant thorns where she listed.
Then he lit a candle, and, removing a board from the floor, peered down into the room whose door was always so securely locked. The stars shone through the uncurtained windows and were no yellower than the gold coins heaped on the large table and overflowing the baskets. Reinaldo took a long pole from a corner and applied to one end a piece of the soft tallow.
Even here, rough and wild as her surroundings were, she gave much thought to her dress; to-night her blonde harmonious loveliness was properly framed in a toilette of mignonette greens, fresh from Paris. A moment later Reinaldo and Prudencia appeared, the former as splendid a caballero as ever, although wearing the chastened air of matrimony, the latter pre-maternally consequential.
The latter separated themselves from the former, and, choosing for their leader one Reinaldo, or Reinhold, marched forward, and took possession of the fortress of Exorogorgon. The Sultan Solimaun was on the alert, with a superior force.
How dared a woman with hair of gold wear the color of the brunette? It was a theft. It was the last indignity. And once more she chained Reinaldo, in default of Estenega, to her side. And deep in Prudencia's heart wove a scheme of vengeance; the loom and warp had been presented unwittingly by her chivalrous father-in-law.
"That is love, I suppose," said Chonita, leaning back in her chair and forgetting the poppies. "With her a placid contented hope, with him a calm preference for a malleable woman. If he left her for another she would cry for a week, then serenely marry whom my father bade her, and forget Reinaldo in the donas of the bridegroom. The birds do almost as well." Don Guillermo smiled indulgently.
Black-eyed dancing-girls in short skirts of tawdry satin trimmed with cotton lace, mock jewels on their bare necks and in their coarse black hair, flew about the room and screamed with delight as Reinaldo flung gold pieces among them. The excitement continued in all its variations until morning.
Valencia used every art of flashing eyes and pouting lips and gay sally there was nothing subtle in her methods to win Estenega to her side; but the sofa on which he sat with Chonita might have been the remotest star in the firmament. Then, prompted by pique and determination to find ointment for her wounded vanity, she suddenly opened her batteries upon Reinaldo.
"Thou hast cause to be proud of Reinaldo, for he sparkles like the spray of the fountain, and words are to him like a shower of leaves in autumn. And yet, and yet," she added, with angry candor, "he has not a brain like Diego Estenega. He is not a man, but a devil."
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