f prisoners who had been executed there. I saw one small,
round, innocent-looking one which couldn't possibly have ever
contained a harsh thought, I was sure, and I indignantly read the tag
to see what he had been martyred for. Sarah, the busy boy had done
twenty-one ladies to death!

We listen to melting music in the Alameda, we ride in the fashion
parade in the Calle San Francisco, we drive out along the beautiful
Paseo de la Reforma and drink chocolate in the shadow of the Castle
of Chapultepec--chocolate made with cinnamon and so rich and sweet it
almost bends the spoon to stir it. Miss Vail remembers with
difficulty that she is the heir of all the ages in the foremost files
of time, a self-supporting young business woman who beats bright
thoughts from a typewriter four earnest hours per diem ... or that
she was....

_Hoy_--to-day, is very satisfying; I forget _ayer_--yesterday;
_Manana_--to-morrow, may never come!

Juana.

_Christmas Eve, Cuernavaca._

_Felisces Pascuas_, Sally dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland!
It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,--the
pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay,
grotesque _pinatis_--huge paper dolls filled with _dulces_, the
childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile
and the sob of it all!

I wish I could have little Dolores Tristeza with me. I sent her a box
of delights.

My pussy willow girl is star-eyed over a telegram and my much more
than civil engineer has told me what he wants for Christmas. If he
had told me on Fifth Avenue or at home, on Wetherby Ridge, I should
have said at once that I was sorry, and I liked him immensely, and so
on, but--but here, in Cuernavaca, in the Borda Gardens, beside the
crumbling pinky palace, where the ghosts of Maximilian and Carlotta
walk at the full of the moon, when he told me that all his days were
wooden beads before I came, and--I don't know, Sally! I don't know!
New York seems very far away ... Rodney Harrison and my St. Michael
seem palely unreal.... Can it be possible, in these gay little weeks,
that, as Lupe would say, "I have arrive'" to love this boy?

Distractedly,

JANE.

CHAPTER XVI

_Orizaba._

MY DEAR SALLY,

In the market place to