of pleasure which made that period of California the most perfected
Arcadia the modern world has known. Some time during the past few
weeks the girl had crossed her hands over her breast and lain down in
her eternal tomb. The woman had arisen and come forth, blinded as yet
by the light, her hands thrust out gropingly.

"It is that man," she told herself, with angry frankness. "I had
not talked with him ten minutes before I felt as I do when the scene
changes suddenly in one of Shakespeare's plays,--as if I had been
flung like a meteor into a new world. I felt the necessity for mental
alertness for the first time in my life; always, before, I had striven
to conceal what I knew. The natural consequences, of course, were
first the desire to feel that stimulation again and again, then to
realize the littleness of everything but mental companionship. I have
read that people who begin with hate sometimes end with love; and if I
were a book woman I suppose I should in time love this man whom I now
so hate, even while I admire. But I am no lump of wax in the hands
of a writer of dreams. I am Chonita Iturbi y Moncada, and he is Diego
Estenega. I could no more love him than could the equator kiss the
poles. Only, much as I hate him, I wish I could see him again. He
knows so much more than any one else. I should like to talk to him,
to ask him many things. He has sworn to marry me." Her lip curled
scornfully, but a sudden glow rushed over her. "Had he not been an
Estenega,--yes, I could have loved him,--that calm, clear-sighted
love that is born of regard; not a whirlwind and a collapse, like most
love. I should like to sit with my hands in my lap and hear him talk
forever. And we cannot even be friends. It is a pity."

The girl's mind was like a splendid castle only one wing of which had
ever been illuminated. By the light of the books she had read, and
of acute observation in a little sphere, she strove to penetrate the
thick walls and carry the torch into broader halls and lofty towers.
But superstition, prejudice, bitter pride, inexperience of life,
conjoined their shoulders and barred the way. As Diego Estenega had
discerned, under the thick Old-World shell of inherited impressions
was a plastic being of all womanly possibilities. But so little did
she know of herself, so futile was her struggle in the dark with only
sudden flashes to blind her and distort all she saw, that with nothing
to shape that moulding kernel it woul