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This very heedlessness and activity of John Ashley’s nature had formed an especial charm to Herlinda; she would have shrunk from and pondered over a more cautious nature,—perhaps would have ended in loving, but she never would have cast aside all the traditions of her youth. All her life she had been like a bird in the cage. For a brief space she had seen the wide expanse of the sky opening above her, she had fluttered upward; but death had struck her down to darkness,—death, which had pierced the strong and loving one who would have guided and protected her! She moaned, and turned her face to the corner of the carriage. An arm stole around her; it was that of Doña Feliz.

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The pale dawn, creeping over the hills behind which the sun was still hidden, revealing to the accustomed sight of Doña Feliz a narrow, irregular street of adobe hovels; a tiny church with a square tower, where the swallows were sleepily chirping; around and behind, stray trees and patches of gardens; upon the waste of sand, where cacti and dusty sagebrush grew, up to the hills where the pines began, a road of yellow sand, winding like a sinuous serpent over all; two or three early loiterers, with eyes turned toward the diligence, which thus early was making its way from the night’s resting place toward the distant city,—such was the scene upon which the trusted servant and friend of the Garcias looked on a morning early in November. She was standing in the low gateway that gave entrance to a garden overgrown with weeds and vines. These vines spread from the fig and orange trees, and half covered the ruinous walls of a house which had once, where the surroundings were so humble, ranked as an elegant mansion, and which indeed had served in years gone by as a temporary retreat, small but attractive, for such of the family of Garcia as desired a few days’ retirement from their accustomed pursuits. Here the ladies had wandered amid the flowers, and sat under the arbors where the purple grapes clustered, and honeysuckle and jessamine mingled their rich odors; and the gentlemen had smoked their cigarettes in luxurious ease, or sallied forth to shoot the golden plover in its season, or hunt the deer amid the surrounding hills. This had in fact been a quinta, or pleasure resort, but since the days of revolutions and bandits it had been utterly abandoned to the rats and owls, or to the nominal care of the ragged brood who huddled together in the half-ruinous kitchen; and here the romance of Herlinda’s life had been enacted.