“I have never given him my consent,” she said into that stony silence. “Not once. Believe me, Will. You must believe me.”

He did and he did not. He believed her with his mind, but in the depths of his heart lurked a small suspicion that she must have, at one time or another.

“And Rosaria?” he asked.

“For a long time, she pretended not to know, but it is a very great effort, pretending all the time. Now this chance has come. To send me to Havana. She is sending me for my sake, but for hers, too.”

She kissed him chastely on the forehead and asked, with a plaintiveness that broke his heart, if she would still see him tomorrow. Of course, he answered. Certamente.

“We must leave the way we came,” she said. “I will wait here a moment.”

Will went out with his thoughts and feelings in a riot. As he opened the gate to the yard, a fleeting shadow appeared in his peripheral vision and he heard someone or something rustling the bushes behind the bohío. He walked toward the sound, fearful that he and Elvira had been spied on. A snuffling noise came from a tangle of shrubs beneath a poinciana, and in a moment, a pig waddled out of the pool of blackness created by the spreading tree.