Rosa shrank into a
doorway and drew her tattered shawl closer over her face for fear
Don Mario might recognize in this misshapen body and in these
pinched, discolored features the beauteous blossom he had craved.
Nor did she forget Colonel Cobo. The man's memory haunted her,
asleep and awake; of him she was most desperately afraid. When for
the first time she saw him riding at the head of his cutthroats
she was like to swoon in her tracks, and for a whole day
thereafter she cowered in the hut, trembling at every sound.
In these dark hours she recalled the stories of the old Varona
treasure and Esteban's interesting theory of its whereabouts, but
she could not bring herself to put much faith in either. At the
time of her brother's recital she had been swayed by his
conviction, but now on cooler thought a dozen explanations of Dona
Isabel's possession of that doubloon offered themselves, no one of
which seemed less probable than Esteban's. Of course it was barely
possible that there was indeed a treasure, and even that Esteban's
surmise had been correct. But it was little more than a remote
possibility. Distance lends a rosy color of reality to our most
absurd imaginings, but, like the haze that tints a far-off
landscape, it dissolves upon approach. Now that Rosa was here, in
sight of the ruined quinta itself, her hopes and half-beliefs
faded.
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