ssandro, the Indian! Perhaps you
think it is less disgrace to the names of Ortegna and Moreno to have her
run away with him, than to be married to him here under our roof! I
do not! Curse the day, I say, when I ever lent myself to breaking the
girl's heart! I am going after them, to fetch them back!"

If the skies had opened and rained fire, the Senora had hardly less
quailed and wondered than she did at these words; but even for fire from
the skies she would not surrender till she must.

"How know you that it is with Alessandro?" she said.

"Because she has written it here!" cried Felipe, defiantly holding
up his little note. "She left this, her good-by to me. Bless her! She
writes like a saint, to thank me for all my goodness to her,--I, who
drove her to steal out of my house like a thief!"

The phrase, "my house," smote the Senora's ear like a note from some
other sphere, which indeed it was,--from the new world into which Felipe
had been in an hour born. Her cheeks flushed, and she opened her lips to
reply; but before she had uttered a word, Luigo came running round
the corner, Juan Can hobbling after him at a miraculous pace on his
crutches. "Senor Felipe! Senor Felipe! Oh, Senora!" they cried. "Thieves
have been here in the night! Baba is gone,--Baba, and the Senorita's
saddle."

A malicious smile broke over the Senora's countenance, and turning to
Felipe, she said in a tone--what a tone it was! Felipe felt as if
he must put his hands to his ears to shut it out; Felipe would never
forget,--"As you were saying, like a thief in the night!"

With a swifter and more energetic movement than any had ever before seen
Senor Felipe make, he stepped forward, saying in an undertone to his
mother, "For God's sake, mother, not a word before the men!--What is
that you say, Luigo? Baba gone? We must see to our corral. I will come
down, after breakfast, and look at it;" and turning his back on them, he
drew his mother by a firm grasp, she could not resist, into the house.

She gazed at him in sheer, dumb wonder.

"Ay, mother," he said, "you may well look thus in wonder; I have been no
man, to let my foster-sister, I care not what blood were in her veins,
be driven to this pass! I will set out this day, and bring her back."

"The day you do that, then, I lie in this house dead!" retorted the
Senora, at white heat. "You may rear as many Indian families as you
please under the Moreno roof, I will at least have my grave!" In