a century to come,--but it had a subtle power, an absolute
audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine
outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and
a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that
mystified and magnetized her.

"I know you a little better," she said, "just a little,--enough to
make my curiosity ache and jump. At the same time, I know now what I
did not before,--that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and
you would always be beyond me. There is something subtle and evasive
about you--something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see
or grasp."

"It is merely the barrier of sex. A man can know a woman fairly well,
because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and
conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple. A man's life is so
complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies
so far outside of woman's sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand
magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,--that she would
need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made
her a diagram of every cell in his brain,--which he never would, out
of consideration for both her and his own vanity. But within certain
restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comradeship."

"But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in
the man always beyond her grasp,--that something which she could be
nothing to. She would be more jealous of that independence of her in
man than of another woman."

"That was pure insight," he said. "You could not know that."

"No," she said, "I had not thought of it before."

I had made a martyr of myself on a three-cornered stone at the
entrance of the canon, waiting to duena them out. "Never will I do
this again!" I exclaimed, with that virtue born of discomfort, as they
came in sight.

"My dearest Eustaquia," said Diego, kissing my hand gallantly, "thou
hast given me pleasure so often, most charming and clever of women,
thou hast but added one new art to thy overflowing store."

We mounted almost immediately upon returning, and I was alone with
Chonita for a moment. "Do you realize that you are playing with fire?"
I said, warningly. "Estenega is a dangerous man; the most successful
man with women I have ever known."

"I do not deny his power," she said. "But I am safe, for the many
reasons thou knowest of. And, being safe, why should I deny