Taking up the pouch, she handed it to him, and he clutched it with a strange eagerness.
"I will give it back presently, Rima," he said.

"Let me first smoke a cigarette--and then another." It seemed probable from this that the good old man had already been casting covetous eyes on my property, and that his granddaughter had taken care of it for me.

But how the silent, demure girl had kept it from him was a puzzle, so intensely did he seem now to enjoy it, drawing the smoke vigorously into his lungs and, after keeping it ten or fifteen seconds there, letting it fly out again from mouth and nose in blue jets and clouds.

His face softened visibly, he became more and more genial and loquacious, and asked me how I came to be in that solitary place.

I told him that I was staying with the Indian Runi, his neighbour.
"But, senor," he said, "if it is not an impertinence, how is it that a young man of so distinguished an appearance as yourself, a Venezuelan, should be residing with these children of the devil ?" "You love not your neighbours, then ?" "I know them, sir--how should I love them ?" He was rolling up his second or third cigarette by this time, and I could not help noticing that he took a great deal more tobacco than he required in his fingers, and that the surplus on each occasion was conveyed to some secret receptacle among his rags.