whose hip a man might confidently expect to hang his hat by
the time she has attained the age of forty.

Nothing could have been farther from the mark. She might have known that
Jack could not have been caught with so thin a bait. All night long she
tossed on her pillow, or silently rose to gaze at the stars from the
window.

"Oh, if she only were not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale
streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and
she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was
sleeping peacefully--that was the irony of fate! What did he know of
suffering? But he would pay for this!

Their rooms overlooked the _patio_, and from behind an angle of a screen
she could look straight across it into the garden beyond as she lay in
bed. The bright shafts of the morning sun sifted down through the
branches of the trees and lay in patches of gold on the grass and
flowers beneath and flooded the _patio_ with light. Above the tops of
the trees and one corner of the low roof, the clear, pale blue skyline
was just visible. Butterflies and humming-birds darted in and out among
the fragrant white clematis and honeysuckle and passion vines that hung
from the arcades surrounding the court, or hovered over the fountain and
basin of gold fish in its center, edged with grasses and ferns. The
notes of the golden oriole and cooing of pigeons and wood-doves mingling
with the silvery jingle of an occasional _vaquero's_ spurs, came from
the garden beyond.

How peaceful it was! After all, why was the place so unusual, so
different from the rest of the world? But forget where one was, and the
scene might have been one in Algiers or Egypt, or in a town in Spain or
Northern Italy. And why, she asked herself, as her thoughts reverted to
Chiquita, was this Indian woman so very different from themselves?

Dress her as they were dressed, and place her in the proper
surroundings, and she would easily pass for a Gypsy or a Spaniard. Was
there any reason to believe that the queens of Sheba and Semiramis with
their tawny skins were any less fair than she, Blanch Lennox, with her
rosy, soft white complexion? Or Chiquita a shade darker than Cleopatra,
the witch of the Nile, whose beauty caused the downfall of Antony and
with it the waning power and splendor of ancient Egypt?

Was her lineage superior to Chiquita's, the descendant of a long line of
rulers whose ancestry stretched back into the d