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As she spoke, she had glided behind him and slipped the bolt of the door, and stood before the solid slab of unpolished but time-darkened cedar, a very monument of wrath. Pedro trembled more than ever, but was not for that the less consistent in his tale of mingled truth and falsehood. He had begun it with the name “The Señorita Herlinda,” but Doña Isabel stopped him with a portentous frown.

“Her name,” she said, “my daughter’s name need not be mentioned. She knows nothing of the woman John Ashley came here to see, if there is one; the Señorita Herlinda has nothing to do with her, nor with your tale. Proceed.”

Pedro, not so deeply versed in the dissimulation of the higher class as was Doña Isabel in that of the lower, looked at her a moment in utter incredulity. He learned nothing from her impassive face, but with the quickwittedness of his race divined that one of the many dark-eyed damsels who served in the house was to be considered the cause of Ashley’s midnight visits. In that light, his own breach of trust seemed more venial. Unconsciously, he shaped his story to that end, and even took to himself a sort of comfort in feigning to believe, what in his heart he knew to be an assumption—whether merely verbal or actual he knew not—of Doña Isabel.