nd.

Had he no kindred, then? asked pitying Rose.

"My two sisters are in a convent;--they had neither money nor beauty;
so they are dead to me. My brother is a Jesuit, so he is dead to me. My
father fell by the hands of Indians in Mexico; my mother, a penniless
widow, is companion, duenna--whatsoever they may choose to call
it--carrying fans and lapdogs for some princess or other there in
Seville, of no better blood than herself; and I--devil! I have lost even
my sword--and so fares the house of De Soto."

Don Guzman, of course, intended to be pitied, and pitied he was
accordingly. And then he would turn the conversation, and begin telling
Italian stories, after the Italian fashion, according to his auditory:
the pathetic ones when Rose was present, the racy ones when she was
absent; so that Rose had wept over the sorrows of Juliet and Desdemona,
and over many another moving tale, long before they were ever enacted
on an English stage, and the ribs of the Bideford worthies had shaken to
many a jest which Cinthio and Bandello's ghosts must come and make for
themselves over again if they wish them to be remembered, for I shall
lend them no shove toward immortality.

And so on, and so on. What need of more words? Before a year was out,
Rose Salterne was far more in love with Don Guzman than he with her; and
both suspected each other's mind, though neither hinted at the truth;
she from fear, and he, to tell the truth, from sheer Spanish pride of
blood. For he soon began to find out that he must compromise that blood
by marrying the heretic burgher's daughter, or all his labor would be
thrown away.

He had seen with much astonishment, and then practised with much
pleasure, that graceful old English fashion of saluting every lady on
the cheek at meeting, which (like the old Dutch fashion of asking young
ladies out to feasts without their mothers) used to give such cause of
brutal calumny and scandal to the coarse minds of Romish visitors from
the Continent; and he had seen, too, fuming with jealous rage, more than
one Bideford burgher, redolent of onions, profane in that way the velvet
cheek of Rose Salterne.

So, one day, he offered his salute in like wise; but he did it when she
was alone; for something within (perhaps a guilty conscience) whispered
that it might be hardly politic to make the proffer in her father's
presence: however, to his astonishment, he received a prompt though
quiet rebuff.

"No, sir; you sh