d keep him
from coming?" Her lips were dry, her cheeks scarlet, her voice husky.
A few more days of this, and she would be in a brain fever, Felipe
thought, as he looked compassionately at her.

"Oh, no, no, dear! Do not think that!" he replied. "A thousand things
might have kept him."

"Ten thousand things would not! Nothing could!" said Ramona. "I know he
is dead. Can't you send a messenger, Felipe, and see?"

The Senora was walking toward them. She overheard the last words.
Looking toward Felipe, no more regarding Ramona than if she had not been
within sight or hearing, the Senora said, "It seems to me that would not
be quite consistent with dignity. How does it strike you, Felipe' If
you thought best, we might spare a man as soon as the vintage is done, I
suppose."

Ramona walked away. The vintage would not be over for a week. There
were several vineyards yet which had not been touched; every hand on the
place was hard at work, picking the grapes, treading them out in tubs,
emptying the juice into stretched raw-hides swung from cross-beams in
a long shed. In the willow copse the brandy-still was in full blast; it
took one man to watch it; this was Juan Can's favorite work; for reasons
of his own he liked best to do it alone; and now that he could no longer
tread grapes in the tubs, he had a better chance for uninterrupted work
at the still. "No ill but has its good," he thought sometimes, as he lay
comfortably stretched out in the shade, smoking his pipe day after day,
and breathing the fumes of the fiery brandy.

As Ramona disappeared in the doorway, the Senora, coming close to
Felipe, and laying her hand on his arm, said in a confidential tone,
nodding her head in the direction in which Ramona had vanished: "She
looks badly, Felipe. I don't know what we can do. We surely cannot send
to summon back a lover we do not wish her to marry, can we? It is very
perplexing. Most unfortunate, every way. What do you think, my son?"
There was almost a diabolical art in the manner in which the Senora
could, by a single phrase or question, plant in a person's mind the
precise idea she wished him to think he had originated himself.

"No; of course we can't send for him," replied Felipe, angrily; "unless
it is to send him to marry her; I wish he had never set foot on the
place. I am sure I don't know what to do. Ramona's looks frighten me. I
believe she will die."

"I cannot wish Alessandro had never set foot on the place,