“The old families,” she was in the habit of saying with a sigh, “are dying out.”

At the same time she made a little gesture with outspread palms, and folded her white hands complacently on her lap as if to indicate that society was not left comfortless—­that she was still there.  From her inferiors she looked for the utmost deference.  Her white hands had never done an hour’s work.  She was ignorant and idle; but she was a lady and a Sarrion.

Cousin Peligros lived in a little apartment in Madrid, which she fondly imagined to be the hub of the social universe.

“They all come,” she said, “to consult the Senorita de Sarrion upon points of etiquette.”

And she patted the air condescendingly with her left hand.  There are some people who seem to be created by a far-seeing Providence as a solemn warning.

“Cousin Peligros,” said Juanita one day, after listening respectfully to a lecture on the care of the hands, “lives in a little field of her own.”

“Like a scarecrow,” added Marcos, the taciturn.

And this was the lady who awaited them at the Palacio Sarrion.  She had been summoned from Madrid by Sarrion, who paid the expenses of the journey; no small item, by the way.  For Cousin Peligros, like many people who live at the expense of others, sought to mitigate the bitterness of the bread of charity by spreading it very thickly with other people’s butter.

She did not come down to the door to meet them when the carriage clattered over the cobble-stones of the echoing patio.

Such a proceeding might have lowered her dignity in the eyes of the servants, who, to do them justice, saw right through Cousin Peligros into the vacuum that lay behind her.  She sat in state in the great drawing-room with her hands folded on her lap and placidly arranged her proposed mode of greeting the newcomers.  She had been informed that Sarrion had found it necessary to take Juanita de Mogente away from the convent school and to assume the cares of that guardianship which had always been an understood obligation mutually binding between himself and Francisco de Mogente.

Cousin Peligros was therefore keenly alive to the fact, that Juanita required at this critical moment of her life a good and abiding example.  Hers also was the blessed knowledge that no one in all Spain was better fitted to offer such an example than the Senorita Peligros de Sarrion.

She therefore sat in her best black silk dress in an attitude subtly combining, with a kind tolerance for all who were so unfortunate as not to be Sarrions, a complacent determination to do her duty.

It is to be regretted that she was for a time left sitting thus, for Perro was in the hall, and his greeting of Juanita had to be acknowledged with several violent hugs, which resulted in Juanita’s mantilla getting mixed up with Perro’s collar.  Then there were the pictures and the armour to be inspected on the stairs.  For Juanita had never seen the palace with its shutters open.