d be ready to his hand, and with a woman's instinct recognizing
their value in setting off the house to other purchasers' eyes, she
took a pleasure in tastefully arranging them, and even found herself
speculating how she might have enjoyed them herself had she been able
to keep possession of the property. After all, it would not have been
so lonely if refined and gentle neighbors, like this old man, would
have sympathized with her; she had an instinctive feeling that, in
their own hopeless decay and hereditary unfitness for this new
civilization, they would have been more tolerant of her husband's
failure than his own kind. She could not believe that Don Jose really
hated her husband for buying of the successful claimant, as there was
no other legal title. Allowing herself to become interested in the
guileless gossip of the new handmaiden, proud of her broken English,
she was drawn into a sympathy with the grave simplicity of Don Jose's
character, a relic of that true nobility which placed this descendant
of the Castilians and the daughter of a free people on the same level.

In this way the second day of her occupancy of Los Cuervos closed, with
dumb clouds along the gray horizon, and the paroxysms of hysterical
wind growing fainter and fainter outside the walls; with the moon
rising after nightfall, and losing itself in silent and mysterious
confidences with drifting scud. She went to bed early, but woke past
midnight, hearing, as she thought, her own name called. The impression
was so strong upon her that she rose, and, hastily enwrapping herself,
went to the dark embrasures of the oven-shaped windows, and looked out.
The dwarfed oak beside the window was still dropping from a past
shower, but the level waste of marsh and meadow beyond seemed to
advance and recede with the coming and going of the moon. Again she
heard her name called, and this time in accents so strangely familiar
that with a slight cry she ran into the corridor, crossed the _patio_,
and reached the open gate. The darkness that had, even in this brief
interval, again fallen upon the prospect she tried in vain to pierce
with eye and voice. A blank silence followed. Then the veil was
suddenly withdrawn; the vast plain, stretching from the mountain to the
sea, shone as clearly as in the light of day; the moving current of the
channel glittered like black pearls, the stagnant pools like molten
lead; but not a sign of life nor motion broke the monotony of