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“I hope you are not hurt?” said the circuit preacher, gravely.

She broke into a laugh so silvery that he thought it no extravagance to liken it to the moonbeams that played over her made audible. She was lithe, yet plump; barred with black and yellow and small-waisted like a pretty wasp. Her complexion in that light was a sheen of pearl satin that made her eyes blacker and her little mouth redder than any other color could. She was small, but, remembering the fourteen-year-old wife of the shopkeeper, he felt that, for all her childish voice and features, she was a grown woman, and a sudden shyness took hold of him.

But she looked pertly in his face, stood her guitar upright before her, and put her hands behind her back as she leaned saucily against the wall and shrugged her shoulders.

“It was the fault of you,” she said, in a broken English that seemed as much infantine as foreign. “What for you not remain to yourself in your own CASA? So it come. You creep so–in the dark- -and shake my wall, and I fall. And she,” pointing to the guitar, “is a’most broke! And for all thees I have only make to you a serenade. Ingrate!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Masterton quickly, “but I was curious. I thought I might help you, and–“

“Make yourself another cat on the wall, eh? No; one is enough, thank you!”

A frown lowered on Masterton’s brow. “You don’t understand me,” he said, bluntly. “I did not know WHO was here.”

“Ah, BUENO! Then it is Pepita Ramirez, you see,” she said, tapping her bodice with one little finger, “all the same; the niece from Manuel Garcia, who keeps the Mission garden and lif there. And you?”

“My name is Masterton.”

“How mooch?”

“Masterton,” he repeated.

She tried to pronounce it once or twice desperately, and then shook her little head so violently that a yellow rose fastened over her ear fell to the ground. But she did not heed it, nor the fact that Masterton had picked it up.

“Ah, I cannot!” she said, poutingly. “It is as deefeecult to make go as my guitar with your serenade.”

“Can you not say ‘Stephen Masterton’?” he asked, more gently, with a returning and forgiving sense of her childishness.

“Es-stefen? Ah, ESTEBAN! Yes; Don Esteban! BUENO! Then, Don Esteban, what for you sink so melank-olly one night, and one night so fierce? The melank-olly, he ees not so bad; but the fierce–ah! he is weeked! Ess it how the Americano make always his serenade?”

Masterton’s brow again darkened. And his hymn of exultation had been mistaken by these people–by this–this wanton child!

“It was no serenade,” he replied, curtly; “it was in the praise of the Lord!”

“Of how mooch?”

“Of the Lord of Hosts–of the Almighty in Heaven.” He lifted his long arms reverently on high.

“Oh!” she said, with a frightened look, slightly edging away from the wall. At a secure distance she stopped. “Then you are a soldier, Don Esteban?”

“No!”

“Then what for you sink ‘I am a soldier of the Lord,’ and you will make die ‘in His army’? Oh, yes; you have said.” She gathered up her guitar tightly under her arm, shook her small finger at him gravely, and said, “You are a hoombog, Don Esteban; good a’ night,” and began to glide away.

“One moment, Miss–Miss Ramirez,” called Masterton. “I–that is you–you have–forgotten your rose,” he added, feebly, holding up the flower. She halted.

“Ah, yes; he have drop, you have pick him up, he is yours. I have drop, you have pick ME up, but I am NOT yours. Good a’ night, COMANDANTE Don Esteban!”

With a light laugh she ran along beside the wall for a little distance, suddenly leaped up and disappeared in one of the largest gaps in its ruined and helpless structure. Stephen Masterton gazed after her stupidly, still holding the rose in his hand. Then he threw it away and re-entered his home.