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As for Chinita, after the rare occasions when she saw the children of the administrador, she tormented Pedro with questions. “What sort of a hut did they live in? What did they eat? Where did their pretty pink dresses come from?”

This last question Pedro answered by sending by the first woman who went to the next village for a wonderful flowered muslin, in which to her immense delight Chinita for a day glittered like a rainbow, but which the dust and grime soon reduced to a level with the more sombre tatters in which she usually appeared. When these were at their worst, Doña Feliz sometimes stopped a moment to look at her and throw a reproving glance at Pedro; but she never spoke to him of the child either for good or ill.

One day, however,—it was the day, they remembered afterward, on which the Padre Francisco celebrated Mass for the last time,—the two little girls accompanied by their mother and followed by their nurse went to the church in new frocks of deep purple, most wonderful to see. Chinita could not keep her eyes off them, though Rosario frowned majestically, drawing her black eyebrows together and even slyly shaking a finger half covered with little rings of tinsel and bright-colored stones. But the other child, the little Chata, covertly smiled at her as she half guiltily turned her gaze from the saint before whose shrine she was kneeling; and that smile had so much of kindliness, curiosity, invitation in it that Chinita on the instant formed a desperate resolution, and determined at once to carry it through.