ike a June hayfield. No, she--she must have been traduced. Not that it
mattered in the least to him. He was cased in triple steel. His heart
was adamant. Or at least as much of it as he had not left in the
possession of Peggy Ramsay, and, when he came to think of it, of several
others.

"You were wishful to see me, sir?" murmured little Concha, "a great
gentleman wanting to see me--wonderful--impossible."

"Neither one nor yet the other," said Rollo, a trifle sharply, looking
at the girl with a glance intended to suppress any lurking tendency to
levity; "if I desired to see you, it was not on my own account, but upon
the King's service." He raised his voice at the last words.

"That explains it," said the girl, with her eyes cast down. She raised
the lids sharply once and then dropped them again. Penitence and a
certain fear could not have been better expressed. Rollo was more
satisfied.

("After all," he thought, "the little thing does not mean any harm. It
is only her simplicity!")

And he twirled his moustachios self-confidently.

"It is not often," he said to himself, "that she has the opportunity of
talking to a man like me--here in this village! I suppose it is
natural." It was--to Concha.

But the girl's expression altered so soon as she heard the service that
was required of her, and she followed with rapt attention the tale of
the garrisoning of the mill-house of Sarria, and the dire need of her
former mistress and friend, Dolores Garcia.

Little Concha's coquetry, her trick of experimenting upon all and sundry
who came near her, her moods and whimsies, transient as the flaws that
ruffle and ripple, breathe upon and again set sparkling the surface of a
mountain tarn--all these dropped from the Andalucian maiden at the
thought of another's need. A moment before, this young foreign soldier,
with the handsome face and the excellent opinion of himself, had been
but fair game to Concha; a prey marked down, not from any fell intent,
but for the due humbling of pride. For Concha was interested in bringing
young men to a sense of their position, and mostly, it may be confessed,
it did them a vast deal of good.

But in that moment she became, instead, the eager listener, the ready
self-sacrificing comrade, the friend as faithful and reliable as any
brother. It was enough for her that El Sarria was there in danger of his
life, that Dona Dolores must be delivered and brought into the safe
shelter of the sisterh