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When Doña Isabel Garcia had desired to send her daughter from the hacienda of Tres Hermanos, in order to remove her from the neighborhood of Ashley and give her the benefit of change, she had at first been sadly perplexed where to send her. Should she go to her relatives in the city, it was possible that her dejected mien and unguarded words might give them a suspicion of the truth,—and Doña Isabel detested gossip, particularly family gossip; besides, she looked upon Herlinda’s marriage with Vicente Gonzales as certain, and dreaded lest the faintest rumor of the young girl’s attachment should reach his ears, and awaken in him the slumbering demon of jealousy,—which, though it might rouse the young soldier as a lover to fresh ardor only, might incite him later as her husband to a tyranny which the mind of Herlinda was ill disposed to bear. In this dilemma the house at Las Parras had occurred to her. Once in her own girlhood she had visited the place, and she remembered it as a most charming sylvan retreat; and although she knew it to be situated in the outskirts of a small hamlet scarce worthy of the name of village, and that it had been abandoned for years, its isolation and abandonment at that juncture precisely constituted its attractions; and thither, under the care of Don Rafael the administrador and of Mademoiselle La Croix, Herlinda had been sent. Precautions had been taken to baffle the inquiries of Ashley as to their route and destination, which, as has been said, an accident revealed to him just when his mind was most strongly excited by the mystery which his disposition and training, as well as his love, led him passionately to resent. Hither, too, when a new and still more important need had risen, Herlinda had been brought.