ently noticed her cousin's eagerness,
and her own eyes had a nervous brightness.

"And where was Dick all this while?" asked Aunt Viney quietly.

Cecily interrupted, and answered for him briskly. "Oh, he was trying to
make attar of rose of himself in the garden. He's still stupefied by his
own sweetness."

"If this means," said Aunt Viney, with matter-of-fact precision, "that
you've been gallivanting all alone, Cecily, on that common plain, where
you're likely to meet all sorts of foreigners and tramps and savages,
and Heaven knows what other vermin, I shall set my face against a
repetition of it. If you MUST go out, and Dick can't go with you--and
I must say that even you and he going out together there at night
isn't exactly the kind of American Christian example to set to our
neighbors--you had better get Concepcion to go with you and take a
lantern."

"But there is nobody one meets on the plain--at least, nobody likely to
harm one," protested Cecily.

"Don't tell ME," said Aunt Viney decidedly; "haven't I seen all sorts
of queer figures creeping along by the brink after nightfall between San
Gregorio and the next rancho? Aren't they always skulking backwards and
forwards to mass and aguardiente?"

"And I don't know why WE should set any example to our neighbors. We
don't see much of them, or they of us."

"Of course not," returned Aunt Viney; "because all proper Spanish young
ladies are shut up behind their grilles at night. You don't see THEM
traipsing over the plain in the darkness, WITH or WITHOUT cavaliers!
Why, Don Rafael would lock one of HIS sisters up in a convent and
consider her disgraced forever, if he heard of it."

Dick felt his cheeks burning; Cecily slightly paled. Yet both said
eagerly together: "Why, what do YOU know about it, Aunty?"

"A great deal," returned Aunt Viney quietly, holding her tatting up to
the light and examining the stitches with a critical eye. "I've got
my eyes about me, thank heaven! even if my ears don't understand the
language. And there's a great deal, my dears, that you young people
might learn from these Papists."

"And do you mean to say," continued Dick, with a glowing cheek and an
uneasy smile, "that Spanish girls don't go out alone?"

"No young LADY goes out without her duenna," said Aunt Viney
emphatically. "Of course there's the Concha variety, that go out without
even stockings."

As the conversation flagged after this, and the young people once or
twi