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There were, indeed, shelves of quaint volumes in the darkened rooms into which Chata sometimes peeped when Doña Feliz left a door ajar; but so great was her awe that she would not have disturbed an atom of dust, and scarce dared to breathe lest the deep stillness of those dusky rooms should be broken by ghostly voices. But Chinita, less scrupulous, had more than once, quite unsuspected, passed what were to her delightful though grewsome hours in those echoing shades, and with the bare data of a few names had repeopled them in imagination with those long dead and gone, as well as with the figure of that stately Doña Isabel, who still lived in some far-off city,—mourning rebelliously, it was whispered, over the beautiful daughter shut from her sight by the walls of a convent, yet who with seemingly pitiless indifference had consigned the equally beautiful younger Carmen to a loveless marriage; for the latter had married an elderly widower, and who could believe it might be from choice? Chinita heard perhaps more of these things than any one, for she was free to run in and out of every hut, as well as the house of the administrador; and with her quick intelligence, her lively imagination, and that faculty which with one drop of Indian blood seems to pervade the entire being,—the faculty of astute and silent assimilation of every glance and hint,—she was in her apparent ignorance and childishness storing thoughts and preparing deductions, which lay as deep from any human eye as the volcanic fires that in the depths of some vine-clad mountain may at any moment burst forth, to amaze and terrify and overwhelm.