hing a ribbon from a certain yellow
dress to the Senor Buchanan to match with a Chinese fan. This was
intolerable!

Faquita writhed in remorse, and averred that through this solitary act
she had dishonored her family.

The Dona Maruja, however, since it was so, felt that the only thing
left to do was to give her the polluted dress, and trust that the Devil
might not fly away with her.

Leaving the perfectly consoled Faquita, Maruja crossed the large hall,
and, opening a small door, entered a dark passage through the thick
adobe wall of the old casa, and apparently left the present century
behind her. A peaceful atmosphere of the past surrounded her not only
in the low vaulted halls terminating in grilles or barred windows; not
only in the square chambers whose dark rich but scanty furniture was
only a foil to the central elegance of the lace-bordered bed and
pillows; but in a certain mysterious odor of dried and desiccated
religious respectability that penetrated everywhere, and made the
grateful twilight redolent of the generations of forgotten Guitierrez
who had quietly exhaled in the old house. A mist as of incense and
flowers that had lost their first bloom veiled the vista of the long
corridor, and made the staring blue sky, seen through narrow windows
and loopholes, glitter like mirrors let into the walls. The chamber
assigned to the young ladies seemed half oratory and half
sleeping-room, with a strange mingling of the convent in the bare white
walls, hung only with crucifixes and religious emblems, and of the
seraglio in the glimpses of lazy figures, reclining in the deshabille
of short silken saya, low camisa, and dropping slippers. In a broad
angle of the corridor giving upon the patio, its balustrade hung with
brightly colored serapes and shawls, surrounded by voluble domestics
and relations, the mistress of the casa half reclined in a hammock and
gave her noonday audience.

Maruja pushed her way through the clustered stools and cushions to her
mother's side, kissed her on the forehead, and then lightly perched
herself like a white dove on the railing. Mrs. Saltonstall, a dark,
corpulent woman, redeemed only from coarseness by a certain softness of
expression and refinement of gesture, raised her heavy brown eyes to
her daughter's face.

"You have not been to bed, Mara?"

"No, dear. Do I look it?"

"You must lie down presently. They tell me that Captain Carroll
returned suddenly this morning.