m for cavil. It was natural that Alessandro came and
went as a physician might. But after Felipe had recovered, why should
this freedom and intimacy continue? More than once there had been sullen
mutterings of this kind on the north veranda, when all the laborers
and servants were gathered there of an evening, Alessandro alone being
absent from the group, and the sounds of his voice or his violin coming
from the south veranda, where the family sat.

"It would be a good thing if we too had a bit of music now and then,"
Juan Canito would grumble; "but the lad's chary enough of his bow on
this side the house."

"Ho! we're not good enough for him to play to!" Margarita would reply;
"'Like master, like servant,' is a good proverb sometimes, but not
always. But there's a deal going on, on the veranda yonder, besides
fiddling!" and Margarita's lips would purse themselves up in an
expression of concentrated mystery and secret knowledge, well fitted to
draw from everybody a fire of questions, none of which, however, would
she answer. She knew better than to slander the Senorita Ramona, or to
say a word even reflecting upon her unfavorably. Not a man or a woman
there would have borne it. They all had loved Ramona ever since she came
among them as a toddling baby. They petted her then, and idolized her
now. Not one of them whom she had not done good offices for,--nursed
them, cheered them, remembered their birthdays and their saints'-days.
To no one but her mother had Margarita unbosomed what she knew, and what
she suspected; and old Marda, frightened at the bare pronouncing of such
words, had terrified Margarita into the solemnest of promises never,
under any circumstances whatever, to say such things to any other member
of the family. Marda did not believe them. She could not. She believed
that Margarita's jealousy had imagined all.

"And the Senora; she'd send you packing off this place in an hour,
and me too, long's I've lived here, if ever she was to know of you
blackening the Senorita. An Indian, too! You must be mad, Margarita!"

When Margarita, in triumph, had flown to tell her that the Senora had
just dragged the Senorita Ramona up the garden-walk, and shoved her into
her room and locked the door, and that it was because she had caught her
with Alessandro at the washing-stones, Marda first crossed herself in
sheer mechanical fashion at the shock of the story, and then cuffed
Margarita's ears for telling her.

"I'll t