ompassionate farewell.

At about this time a slight change in her manner was noticed by the few
who saw her more frequently. Her apparently invincible girlishness of
spirit had given way to a certain matronly seriousness. She applied
herself to her household cares and the improvement of the hacienda with
a new sense of duty and a settled earnestness, until by degrees she
wrought into it not only her instinctive delicacy and taste, but part
of her own individuality. Even the rude rancheros and tradesmen who were
permitted to enter the walls in the exercise of their calling began to
speak mysteriously of the beauty of this garden of the almarjal. She
went out but seldom, and then accompanied by the one or the other of her
female servants, in long drives on unfrequented roads. On Sundays she
sometimes drove to the half-ruined mission church of Santa Inez, and
hid herself, during mass, in the dim monastic shadows of the choir.
Gradually the poorer people whom she met in these journeys began to
show an almost devotional reverence for her, stopping in the roads with
uncovered heads for her to pass, or making way for her in the tienda
or plaza of the wretched town with dumb courtesy. She began to feel a
strange sense of widowhood, that, while it at times brought tears to
her eyes, was, not without a certain tender solace. In the sympathy and
simpleness of this impulse she went as far as to revive the mourning she
had worn for her parents, but with such a fatal accenting of her beauty,
and dangerous misinterpreting of her condition to eligible bachelors
strange to the country, that she was obliged to put it off again. Her
reserve and dignified manner caused others to mistake her nationality
for that of the Santierras, and in "Dona Bella" the simple Mrs.
Tucker was for a while forgotten. At times she even forgot it herself.
Accustomed now almost entirely to the accents of another language and
the features of another race, she would sit for hours in the corridor,
whose massive bronzed inclosure even her tasteful care could only make
an embowered mausoleum of the Past, or gaze abstractedly from the dark
embrasures of her windows across the stretching almarjal to the shining
lagoon beyond that terminated the estuary. She had a strange fondness
for this tranquil mirror, which under sun or stars always retained the
passive reflex of the sky above, and seemed to rest her weary eyes. She
had objected to one of the plans projected by Poi