When she came out to the
carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage they
cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her, which she
acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading lady's
lady's-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our omnibus window
to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She put her head out and
said in a voice hoarse with excitement and good-fellowship, _"Adios,
hombres!"_ ("Good-by, men!"), and vanished with us from their applausive
presence.
With us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was snow
on the Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving
Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of the
running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the moonlight
night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in the dismal
drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before
the station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our craft should have
floundered, but it made its way to the door, and left us dry shod within
and glad to be quitting the city of my young dreams.
XII
THE SURPRISES OF RONDA
The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before the station at
Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and
farther down the mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a fog
as white and almost as cold.
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