er her rudely.

She continued:

"You must forgive me if I am wrong, but I fancy that, in addition to the
annoyance of seeing yourself deprived to-day of your favorite
occupation, there is something else that powerfully contributes to your
ill-humor."

"And what is this something else?" I said; "since you have discovered
it, or fancy you have done so."

"This something else," responded Pepita, "is a feeling not altogether
becoming in one who is going to be a priest so soon, but very natural in
a young man of twenty-two."

On hearing this I felt the blood mount to my face, and my face burn. I
imagined a thousand absurdities; I thought myself beset by evil spirits;
I fancied myself tempted by Pepita, who was doubtless about to let me
understand that she knew I loved her. Then my timidity gave place to
haughtiness, and I looked her steadily in the face. There must have been
something laughable in my look, but either Pepita did not observe it,
or, if she did, she concealed the fact with amiable discretion; for she
exclaimed, in the most natural manner:

"Do not be offended because I find you are not without fault. This that
I have observed seems to me a slight one. You are hurt by the jests of
Currito, and by being compelled to play--speaking profanely--a not very
dignified _role_, mounted, like the reverend vicar with his eighty
years, on a placid mule, and not, as a youth of your age and condition
should be, on a spirited horse. The fault is the reverend dean's, to
whom it did not occur that you should learn to ride. To know how to
manage a horse is not opposed to the career you intend to follow, and I
think, now that you are here, that your father might in a few days give
you the necessary instruction to enable you to do so. If you should go
to Persia or to China, where there are no railroads yet, you will make
but a sorry figure in those countries as a bad horseman. It is possible,
even, that, through this want of foresight of the dean's, the missionary
himself may come to lose prestige in the eyes of those barbarians, which
will make it all the more difficult for him to reap the fruits of his
labors."

This and other arguments Pepita adduced in order to persuade me to learn
to ride on horseback; and I was so convinced of the necessity of a
missionary's being a good horseman, that I promised her to learn at
once, taking my father for a teacher.

"On the very next expedition we make," I said, "I shall ride the m