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After satisfying her hungry anxiety to catch a glimpse of the servants, and finding them strangers, Herlinda made no further effort to encounter them. She was very ill after arrival, and it is doubtful whether the attendants—dull, apathetic creatures—ever saw her face plainly from the day she entered the house until that of which we speak, when Doña Feliz stood in the low doorway in the garden wall, and looked toward the diligence which appeared indistinctly, a moving monster in the distance. She glanced back occasionally, half impatiently, half sorrowfully, to the house. Through the open door of it presently glided Doña Isabel. Her head was bent, her olive cheeks were deadly pale, and she shivered as with cold as she stepped out into the dusk of early morning,—or rather late night, for it was an hour when not a creature around the place was stirring, not even the birds; a wide-eyed cat stared at her as she passed down the narrow walk, and she shrank even from its gaze. She held something under her black reboso, which upon reaching Feliz she passed to her with averted eyes.