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“Quien sabe?” repeated Antonio, gruffly, as the young girl blushed under his significant eyes. “It is no affair of mine,” he added to himself, as he led Pinto away. “Perhaps Father Pedro is right, and this young twig of the Church is as dry and sapless as himself. Let the mestiza burn if she likes.”

“Quick, Pancho,” said the young girl, eagerly leading him along the corridor. “This way. I must talk with thee before thou seest Don Juan; that is why I ran to intercept thee, and not as that fool Antonio would signify, to shame thee. Wast thou ashamed, my Pancho?”

The boy threw his arm familiarly round the supple, stayless little waist, accented only by the belt of the light flounced saya, and said, “But why this haste and feverishness, ‘Nita? And now I look at thee, thou hast been crying.”

They had emerged from a door in the corridor into the bright sunlight of a walled garden. The girl dropped her eyes, cast a quick glance around her, and said:

“Not here; to the arroyo;” and half leading, half dragging him, made her way through a copse of manzanita and alder until they heard the faint tinkling of water. “Dost thou remember,” said the girl, “it was here,” pointing to an embayed pool in the dark current, “that I baptized thee, when Father Pedro first brought thee here, when we both played at being monks? They were dear old days, for Father Pedro would trust no one with thee but me, and always kept us near him.”

“Aye, and he said I would be profaned by the touch of any other, and so himself always washed and dressed me, and made my bed near his.”

“And took thee away again, and I saw thee not till thou camest with Antonio, over a year ago, to the cattle branding. And now, my Pancho, I may never see thee again.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed aloud.

The little acolyte tried to comfort her, but with such abstraction of manner and inadequacy of warmth that she hastily removed his caressing hand.

“But why? What has happened?” he asked eagerly.

The girl’s manner had changed. Her eyes flashed, and she put her brown fist on her waist and began to rock from side to side.

“But I’ll not go,” she said, viciously.

“Go where?” asked the boy.

“Oh, where?” she echoed, impatiently. “Hear me, Francisco. Thou knowest I am, like thee, an orphan; but I have not, like thee, a parent in the Holy Church. For, alas,” she added, bitterly, “I am not a boy, and have not a lovely voice borrowed from the angels. I was, like thee, a foundling, kept, by the charity of the reverend fathers, until Don Juan, a childless widower, adopted me. I was happy, not knowing and caring who were the parents who had abandoned me, happy only in the love of him who became my adopted father. And now”–She paused.

“And now?” echoed Francisco, eagerly.

“And now they say it is discovered who are my parents.”

“And they live?”

“Mother of God! no,” said the girl, with scarcely filial piety. “There is some one, a thing, a mere Don Fulano, who knows it all, it seems, who is to be my guardian.”

“But how? Tell me all, dear Juanita,” said the boy with a feverish interest, that contrasted so strongly with his previous abstraction that Juanita bit her lips with vexation.

“Ah! How? Santa Barbara! An extravaganza for children. A necklace of lies. I am lost from a ship of which my father–Heaven rest him!–is General, and I am picked up among the weeds on the sea-shore, like Moses in the bulrushes. A pretty story, indeed.”

“O how beautiful!” exclaimed Francisco enthusiastically. “Ah, Juanita, would it had been me!”

“Thee!” said the girl bitterly,–“thee! No!–it was a girl wanted. Enough, it was me.”

“And when does the guardian come?” persisted the boy, with sparkling eyes.

“He is here even now, with that pompous fool the American alcalde from Monterey, a wretch who knows nothing of the country or the people, but who helped the other American to claim me. I tell thee, Francisco, like as not it is all a folly, some senseless blunder of those Americanos that imposes upon Don Juan’s simplicity and love for them.”