rough," answered Marcos.

"Yes," she said, rather slowly. "What a joke."

But now they were at the gate of the convent school, having come a short
way, and they stood beneath the thick trees until the school came, with
its usual accompaniment of eager talk like the running of water beneath a
low bridge and its babble round the stones.

Juanita slipped in among her schoolmates, and Sor Teresa, looking
straight in front of her, saw nothing.

CHAPTER X

THISBE
It was the custom in the convent school on the Torrero-hill to receive
visitors on Thursdays. This festivity farther extended to the evening,
when the girls were allowed to walk for an hour in the garden and talk.
Talking, it must be remembered, as an indulgence of the flesh, is
considered in religious communities to be a treat only permitted at
certain periods. It is, indeed, only by tying the tongue that tyranny can
hope to live.

"These promenades are not without use," the Mother Superior once said to
Evasio Mon, one of the lay directors of this school. "One discovers what
friendships have been formed."

But the Mother Superior, like many cunning persons, was wrong. For a
schoolgirl's friendship is like the seed of grass, blown hither and
thither; while only one or two of a sowing take root in some hidden
corner and grow.

Juanita's bosom friend of the red hair had recovered her lost position.
Her hair was, in fact, golden again. They were walking in the garden at
sunset, and waiting for the clock of San Fernando to strike seven.
Juanita had told her friend of the chocolates--all soft inside--which
were to come through the hole in the wall; and the golden haired girl had
confided in Juanita that she had never loved her as she did at that
moment. Which was, perhaps, not unnatural.

The garden of the convent school is large, and spreads far down the slope
of the hill. There are many fruit-trees and a few cypress. Where the
stream runs there are bunches of waving bamboos, and at the lower end,
where the wall is broken, there is a little grove of nut trees, where the
nightingales sing.

"It must be seven; come, let us go slowly towards the trees," said
Juanita. They both looked round eagerly. There were two nuns in the
gardens, gravely walking side by side, casting demure and not unkindly
glances from time to time towards their gay charges. Juanita and her
friend had, as elder girls, certain privileges, and were allowed to walk
apart from the rest.