THE first day had gone, it was near night of the second, and not a word had passed between Felipe and Ramona, except in the presence of the Senora. It would have been beautiful to see, if it had not been so cruel a thing, the various and methods by which the Senora had brought this about. Felipe, oddly enough, was more under it than Ramona. She had her dreams. He had nothing but his restless consciousness that he had not done for her what he hoped; that he must seem to her to have been disloyal; this, and a continual wonder what she could be planning or expecting which made her so , kept Felipe in a fever of unrest, of which his mother every sign, and redoubled her vigilance.  
Felipe thought perhaps he could speak to Ramona in the night, through her window. But the August heats were fierce now; everybody slept with wide-open windows; the Senora was always wakeful; if she should chance to hear him thus holding secret with Ramona, it would indeed make bad matters worse. Nevertheless, he to try it. At the first sound of his footsteps on the floor, “My son, are you ill? Can I do anything?” came from the Senora's window. She had not been asleep at all. It would take more courage than Felipe , to try that plan again; and he lay on his veranda bed, this afternoon, tossing about with sheer at his baffled purpose. Ramona sat at the foot of the bed, taking the last stitches in the nearly completed altar-cloth. The Senora sat in her usual seat, , with her head thrown back. It was very hot; a sultry south-wind, with dust from the desert, had been blowing all day, and every living creature was more or less by it.
 
As the Senora's eyes closed, a sudden thought struck Felipe. Taking out a memorandum-book in which he kept his accounts, he began rapidly writing. Looking up, and Ramona's eye, he made a sign to her that it was for her. She glanced at the Senora. She was asleep. Presently Felipe, folding the note, and it in his hand, rose, and walked towards Ramona's window, Ramona terrifiedly watching him; the sound of Felipe's steps roused the Senora, who sat up instantly, and gazed about her with that indescribable expression to people who hope they have not been asleep, but know they have. “Have I been asleep?” she asked.
 
“About one minute, mother,” answered Felipe, who was leaning, as he , against Ramona's open window, his arms crossed behind him. Stretching them out, and back and a few times, yawning idly, he said, “This heat is intolerable!” Then he sauntered down the veranda steps into the garden-walk, and seated himself on the bench under the trellis there.
 
The note had been thrown into Ramona's room. She was hot and cold with fear lest she might not be able to get it unobserved. What if the Senora were to go first into the room! She hardly dared look at her. But fortune is not always on the side of . The Senora was fast dozing off again, relieved that Felipe was out of speaking distance of Ramona. As soon as her eyes were again shut, Ramona rose to go. The Senora opened her eyes. Ramona was crossing the threshold of the door; she was going into the house. Good! Still farther away from Felipe.
 
“Are you going to your room, Ramona?” said the Senor.
 
“I was,” replied Ramona, alarmed. “Did you want me here?”
 
“No,” said the Senora; and she closed her eyes again.
 
In a second more the note was safe in Ramona's hands.
 
“Dear Ramona,” Felipe had written, “I am distracted because I cannot speak with you alone. Can you think of any way? I want to explain things to you. I am afraid you do not understand. Don't be unhappy. Alessandro will surely be back in four days. I want to help you all I can, but you saw I could not do much. Nobody will hinder your doing what you please; but, dear, I wish you would not go away from us!”
 
Tearing the paper into small fragments, Ramona thrust them into her , to be destroyed later. Then looking out of the window, and seeing that the Senora was now in a sound sleep, she ventured to write a reply to Felipe, though when she would find a safe opportunity to give it to him, there was no telling. “Thank you, dear Felipe. Don't be anxious. I am not unhappy. I understand all about it. But I must go away as soon as Alessandro comes.” Hiding this also safe in her bosom, she went back to the veranda. Felipe rose, and walked toward the steps. Ramona, suddenly bold, stooped, and laid her note on the second step. Again the tired eyes of the Senora opened. They had not been shut five minutes; Ramona was at her work; Felipe was coming up the steps from the garden. He nodded laughingly to his mother, and laid his finger on his lips. All was well. The Senora again. Her nap had cost her more than she would ever know. This one secret interchange between Felipe and Ramona then, thus making, as it were, common cause with each other as against her, and in fear of her, was a step never to be recalled,—a step whose significance could scarcely be . Tyrants, great and small, are apt to overlook such possibilities as this; to forget the which the most trivial incident may assume when forced into false proportions and relations. Tyranny can make and cheats out of the honestest souls. It is done oftener than any except close students of human nature realize. When kings and emperors do this, the world cries out with sympathy, and holds the plotters more innocent than the who provoked the plot. It is Russia that stands branded in men's thoughts, and not Siberia.
 
The Senora had a Siberia of her own, and it was there that Ramona was living in these days. The Senora would have been surprised to know how little the girl felt the cold. To be sure, it was not as if she had ever felt warmth in the Senora's presence; yet between the former chill and this were many degrees, and except for her new life, and new love, and hope in the thought of Alessandro, Ramona could not have borne it for a day.
 
The fourth day came; it seemed strangely longer than the others had. All day Ramona watched and listened. Felipe, too; for, knowing what Alessandro's impatience would be, he had, in truth, looked for him on the previous night. The horse he rode was a fleet one, and would have made the journey with ease in half the time. But Felipe reflected that there might be many things for Alessandro to arrange at Temecula. He would doubtless return prepared to take Ramona back with him, in case that proved the only alternative left them. Felipe grew wretched as his fancy dwelt on the picture of Ramona's future. He had been in the Temecula village. He knew its poverty; the thought of Ramona there was , To the indolent, ease-loving Felipe it was incredible that a girl reared as Ramona had been, could for a moment leading the life of a poor man's wife. He could not conceive of love's making one undertake any such life. Felipe had much to learn of love. Night came; no Alessandro. Till the darkness settled down, Ramona sat, watching the . When she could no longer see, she listened. The Senora, noting all, also listened. She was uneasy as to the next stage of affairs, but she would not speak. Nothing should induce her to from the line of conduct on which she had . It was the full of the moon. When the first broad beam of its light came over the hill, and flooded the garden and the white front of the little , just as it had done on that first night when Alessandro watched with Felipe on the veranda, Ramona pressed her face against the window-panes, and gazed out into the garden. At each , motion of the shadows she saw the form of a man approaching. Again and again she saw it. Again and again the breeze died, and the shadow ceased. It was near morning before, weary, sad, she crept to bed; but not to sleep. With wide-open, anxious eyes, she still watched and listened. Never had the thought once crossed her mind that Alessandro might not come at the time Felipe had said. In her childlike she had accepted this as unquestioningly as she had accepted other facts in her life. Now that he did not come, unreasoning and unfounded terror took possession of her, and she asked herself continually, “Will he ever come! They sent him away; perhaps he will be too proud to come back!” Then faith would return, and saying to herself, “He would never, never me; he knows I have no one in the whole world but him; he knows how I love him,” she would composure, and remind herself of the many which might have prevented his coming at the time set. Spite of all, however, she was heavy at heart; and at breakfast her anxious eyes and absent look were sad to see. They hurt Felipe. Too well he knew what it meant. He also was anxious. The Senora saw it in his face, and it her. The girl might well pine, and be if her lover did not appear. But why should Felipe himself? The Senora disliked it. It was a bad symptom. There might be trouble ahead yet. There was, indeed, trouble ahead,—of a sort the Senora's imaginings had not pictured.
 
Another day passed; another night; another, and another. One week now since Alessandro, as he leaped on his horse, had grasped Felipe's hand, and said: “You will tell the Senorita; you will make sure that she understands why I go; and in four days I will be back.” One week, and he had not come. The three who were watching and wondering looked into each other's faces, each to know what the others thought.
 
Ramona was and haggard. She had scarcely slept. The idea had taken possession of her that Alessandro was dead. On the sixth and seventh days she had walked each afternoon far down the river road, by which he would be sure to come; down the meadows, and by the cross-cut, out to the highway; at each step straining her tearful eyes into the distance,—the cruel, blank, silent distance. She had come back after dark, whiter and more wan than she went out. As she sat at the supper-table, silent, making no feint of eating, only drinking glass after glass of milk, in thirsty haste, even Margarita pitied her. But the Senora did not. She thought the best thing which could happen, would be that the Indian should never come back. Ramona would recover from it in a little while; the would be the worst thing, but even that, time would heal. She wondered that the girl had not more pride than to let her wretchedness be so plainly seen. She herself would have died before she would go about with such a woe-begone face, for a whole household to see and gossip about.
 
On the morning of the eighth day, Ramona, desperate, Felipe, as he was going down the veranda steps. The Senora was in the garden, and saw them; but Ramona did not care. “Felipe!” she cried, “I must, I must speak to you! Do you think Alessandro is dead? What else could keep him from coming?” Her lips were dry, her cheeks , her voice husky. A few more days of this, and she would be in a brain fever, Felipe thought, as he looked at her.
 
“Oh, no, no, dear! Do not think that!” he replied. “A thousand things might have kept him.”
 
“Ten thousand things would not! Nothing could!” said Ramona. “I know he is dead. Can't you send a messenger, Felipe, and see?”
 
The Senora was walking toward them. She overheard the last words. Looking toward Felipe, no more regarding Ramona than if she had not been within sight or hearing, the Senora said, “It seems to me that would not be quite consistent with dignity. How does it strike you, Felipe' If you thought best, we might spare a man as soon as the vintage is done, I suppose.”
 
Ramona walked away. The vintage would not be over for a week. There were several vineyards yet which had not been touched; every hand on the place was hard at work, picking the grapes, treading them out in tubs, emptying the juice into stretched raw-hides swung from cross-beams in a long shed. In the copse the brandy-still was in full blast; it took one man to watch it; this was Juan Can's favorite work; for reasons of his own he liked best to do it alone; and now that he could no longer tread grapes in the tubs, he had a better chance for uninterrupted work at the still. “No ill but has its good,” he thought sometimes, as he lay comfortably stretched out in the shade, smoking his pipe day after day, and breathing the of the brandy.
 
As Ramona disappeared in the , the Senora, coming close to Felipe, and laying her hand on his arm, said in a tone, nodding her head in the direction in which Ramona had vanished: “She looks badly, Felipe. I don't know what we can do. We surely cannot send to summon back a lover we do not wish her to marry, can we? It is very perplexing. Most unfortunate, every way. What do you think, my son?” There was almost a art in the manner in which the Senora could, by a single phrase or question, plant in a person's mind the precise idea she wished him to think he had originated himself.
 
“No; of course we can't send for him,” replied Felipe, angrily; “unless it is to send him to marry her; I wish he had never set foot on the place. I am sure I don't know what to do. Ramona's looks frighten me. I believe she will die.”
 
“I cannot wish Alessandro had never set foot on the place,” said the Senora, gently, “for I feel that I owe your life to him, my Felipe; and he is not to blame for Ramona's conduct. You need not fear her dying, She may be ill; but people do not die of love like hers for Alessandro.”
 
“Of what kind do they die, mother?” asked Felipe, impatiently.
 
The Senora looked reproachfully at him. “Not often of any,” she said; “but certainly not of a sudden passion for a person in every way beneath them, in position, in education, in all points which are essential to congeniality of tastes or association of life.”
 
The Senora spoke calmly, with no excitement, as if she were discussing an abstract case. Sometimes, when she spoke like this, Felipe for the moment felt as if she were right, as if it were really a disgraceful thing in Ramona to have thus loved Alessandro. It could not be that there was this , of which she spoke. Alessandro was undeniably Ramona's inferior in position, education, in all the external matters of life; but in nature, in true nobility of soul, no! Alessandro was no man's inferior in these; and in capacity to love,—Felipe sometimes wondered whether he had ever known Alessandro's equal in that. This thought had occurred to him more than once, as from his sick-bed he had, unobserved, studied the expression with which Alessandro gazed at Ramona. But all this made no difference in the perplexity of the present , in the of his and his mother's position now. Send a messenger to ask why Alessandro did not return! Not even if he had been an accepted and publicly recognized lover, would Felipe do that! Ramona ought to have more pride. She ought of herself to know that. And when Felipe, later in the day, saw Ramona again, he said as much to her. He said it as gently as he could; so gently that she did not at first comprehend his idea. It was so foreign, so with her faith, how could she?
 
When she did understand, she said slowly: “You mean that it will not do to send to find out if Alessandro is dead, because it will look as if I wished him to marry me whether he wished it or not?” and she her eyes on Felipe's, with an expression he could not .
 
“Yes, dear,” he answered, “something like that, though you put it harshly.”
 
“Is it not true,” she persisted, “that is what you mean?”
 
Reluctantly Felipe admitted that it was.
 
Ramona was silent for some moments; then she said, speaking still more slowly, “If you feel like that, we had better never talk about Alessandro again. I suppose it is not possible that you should know, as I do, that nothing but his being dead would keep him from coming back. Thanks, dear Felipe;” and after this she did not speak again of Alessandro.
 
Days went by; a week. The vintage was over. The Senora wondered if Ramona would now ask again for a messenger to go to Temecula. Almost even the Senora relented, as she looked into the girl's white and wasted face, as she sat silent, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the willows. The altar-cloth was done, folded and laid away. It would never hang in the Moreno chapel. It was promised, in Ramona's mind, to Father Salvierderra. She had resolved to go to him; if he, a feeble old man, could walk all the way between Santa Barbara and their home, she could surely do the same. She would not lose the way. There were not many roads; she could ask. The convent, the bare thought of which had been so terrible to Ramona fourteen days ago, when the Senora had threatened her with it, now seemed a heavenly refuge, the only shelter she . There was a school for attached to the convent at San Juan Bautista, she knew; she would ask the Father to let her go there, and she would spend the rest of her life in prayer, and in teaching the girls. As hour after hour she sat this plan, her fancy projected itself so into the future, that she lived years of her life. She felt herself , old. She saw the procession of , going to vespers, leading the children by the hand; herself wrinkled and white-haired, walking between two of the little ones. The picture gave her peace. As soon as she grew a little stronger, she would set off on her journey to the Father; she could not go just yet, she was too weak; her feet trembled if she did but walk to the foot of the garden. Alessandro was dead; there could be no doubt of that. He was buried in that little walled of which he had told her. Sometimes she thought she would try to go there and see his grave, perhaps see his father; if Alessandro had told him of her, the old man would be glad to see her; perhaps, after all, her work might lie there, among Alessandro's people. But this looked hard: she had not courage for it; shelter and rest were what she wanted,—the sound of the Church's prayers, and the Father's every day. The convent was the best.
 
She thought she was sure that Alessandro was dead; but she was not, for she still listened, still watched. Each day she walked out on the river road, and sat waiting till dusk. At last came a day when she could not go; her strength failed her. She lay all day on her bed. To the Senora, who asked if she were ill, she answered: “No, Senora, I do not think I am ill, I have no pain, but I cannot get up. I shall be better to-morrow.”
 
“I will send you strong and a medicine,” the Senora said; and sent her both by the hands of Margarita, whose and broke down at the first sight of Ramona's face on the pillow; it looked so much thinner and sharper there than it had when she was sitting up. “Oh, Senorita! Senorita!” she cried, in a tone of grief, “are you going to die? Forgive me, forgive me!”
 
“I have nothing to forgive you, Margarita,” replied Ramona, raising herself on her elbow, and lifting her eyes to the girl's face as she took the broth from her hands. “I do not know why you ask me to forgive you.”
 
Margarita flung herself on her knees by the bed, in a passion of weeping. “Oh, but you do know, Senorita, you do know! Forgive me!”
 
“No, I know nothing,” replied Ramona; “but if you know anything, it is all forgiven. I am not going to die, Margarita. I am going away,” she added, after a second's pause. Her inmost instinct told her that she could trust Margarita now. Alessandro being dead, Margarita would no longer be her enemy, and Margarita could perhaps help her. “I am going away, Margarita, as soon as I feel a little stronger. I am going to a convent; but the Senora does not know. You will not tell?”
 
“No, Senorita!” whispered Margarita,—thinking in her heart, “Yes, she is going away, but it will be with the angels.”—“No, Senorita, I will not tell. I will do anything you want me to.”
 
“Thanks, Margarita mia,” replied Ramona. “I thought you would;” and she lay back on her pillow, and closed her eyes, looking so much more like death than like life that Margarita's tears flowed faster than before, and she ran to her mother, out, “Mother, mother! the Senorita is ill to death. I am sure she is. She has taken to her bed; and she is as white as Senor Felipe was at the worst of the fever.”
 
“Ay,” said old Marda, who had seen all this for days back; “ay, she has wasted away, this last week, like one in a fever, sure enough; I have seen it. It must be she is starving herself to death.”
 
“Indeed, she has not eaten for ten days,—hardly since that day;” and Margarita and her mother exchanged looks. It was not necessary to further define the day.
 
“Juan Can says he thinks he will never be seen here again,” continued Margarita.
 
“The saints grant it, then,” said Marda, hotly, “if it is he has cost the Senorita all this! I am that turned about in my head with it all, that I've no thoughts to think; but plain enough it is, he is mixed up with whatever 'tis has gone wrong.”
 
“I could tell what it is,” said Margarita, her old pertness coming uppermost for a moment; “but I've got no more to say, now the Senorita's lying on her bed, with the face she's got. It's enough to break your heart to look at her. I could just go down on my knees to her for all I've said; and I will, and to Saint Francis too! She's going to be with him before long; I know she is.”
 
“No,” said the wiser, older Marda. “She is not so ill as you think. She is young. It's the heart's gone out of her; that's all. I've been that way myself. People are, when they're young.”
 
“I'm young!” retorted Margarita. “I've never been that way.”
 
“There's many a mile to the end of the road, my girl,” said Marda, significantly; “and 'It's ill boasting the first day out,' was a proverb when I was your age!”
 
Marda had never been much more than half-way fond of this own child of hers. Their natures were . Traits which, in Margarita's father, had many a day of Marda's early married life, were perpetually cropping out in Margarita, making between the mother and daughter a barrier which even love was not always strong enough to . And, as was , this was constantly leading to things which seemed to Margarita, and in fact were, unjust and ill-founded.
 
“She's always flinging out at me, whatever I do,” thought Margarita. “I know one thing; I'll never tell her what the Senorita's told me; never,—not till after she's gone.”
 
A sudden suspicion flashed into Margarita's mind. She seated herself on ............