protesting that I had been sufficiently excited for
one day, and quite unceremoniously ordered her master out of the room;
upon which Don Luis, laughing heartily at his favourite servant's
brusqueness, shook me cordially by the hand, hoped I should soon be well
enough to quit my sick chamber, and informed me that he would now do
himself the pleasure to visit me for a few minutes daily, if only for
the purpose of assuring himself that Mama Elisa had not poisoned me with
any of her vile concoctions. After which parting shot at Mama he
effected a masterly retreat.

From this time onward I mended rapidly, and on the sixth day after Don
Luis's first visit I was well enough to rise from my bed and leave my
room for an hour or two. And now I should have been in a ludicrous
difficulty in the matter of clothes--for the scanty garments in which I
had come ashore were not only ruined by long immersion in sea water, but
were also in rags--had it not been for the fortunate circumstance that
Don Luis and I were, as nearly as possible of the same height, which
enabled him generously to place his wardrobe at my disposal. But while
Don Luis was a fine, square-shouldered, well-built fellow, I had shrunk
to little more than a skeleton, so that although the clothes fitted me
well enough as to their lateral dimensions, in other respects they made
me look pretty much of a scarecrow, and I could not avoid seeing the
ghost of a smile flickering in Don Luis's eyes when, upon my first
appearance in public, so to speak, he presented me in due form to his
wife, Dona Inez. But there was no smile on that sweet lady's lips, nor
in her eyes as they fell upon me and noted the evidences of suffering in
my hollow cheeks and wasted form; on the contrary, she was at once all
commiseration and sympathy as she expressed her gratification that it
had fallen to the lot of one of her people to find me in the hour of my
need, and to bring me to the shelter of her roof instead of leaving me
to perish, as might very well have happened had the fisherman who found
me been any other than Tomasso.

She was quite a young woman, not more than twenty-five, I thought; a
typical Spaniard, with dark melting eyes shaded by very long, curving
lashes, an immense quantity of black glossy hair, a clear colourless
skin, _petite_, handsome, and exceedingly graceful in her every
movement; but, even better than all that, she was kind, gentle in her
manner, tender-hearted and s