streamed in, and she saw that all were asleep.  She crossed the room and looked down upon Diego Estenega.  His night garment, low about the throat, made his head, with its sharply-cut profile, look like the heads on old Roman medallions.  The pallor of night, the extreme refinement of his face, the deep repose, gave him an unmortal appearance.  Chonita bent over him fearfully.  Was he dead?  His breathing was regular, but very quiet.  She stood gazing down upon him, the instinct of seeking vanished.  What did it mean?  Was this her soul!  A man?  How could it be?  Even in poetry she had never read of a man being a woman’s soul,—­a man with all his frailties and sins, for the most part unrepented.  She felt, rather than knew, that Estenega had trampled many laws, and that he cared too little for any law but his own will to repent.  And yet, there he lay, looking, in the gray light and the impersonality of sleep, as sinless as if he had been created within the hour.  He looked not like a man but a spirit,—­a soul; and the soul was hers.

Again she asked herself, what did it mean?  Was the soul but brain?  She and he were so alike in rudiments, yet he so immeasurably beyond her in experience and knowledge and the stronger fiber of a man’s mind—­

He awoke suddenly and saw her.  For a moment he stared incredulously, then raised himself on his hand.

“Chonita!” he whispered.

But Chonita, with the long glide of the Californian woman, faded from the room.

When she awoke the next morning she was assailed by a distressing fear.  Had she been to Estenega’s room the night before?  The memory was too vivid, the details too practical, for a sleep-vagary.  At breakfast she hardly dared to raise her eyes.  She felt that he was watching her; but he often watched her.  After breakfast they were alone at one end of the corridor for a moment, and she compelled herself to raise her eyes and look at him steadily.  He was regarding her searchingly.

She was not a woman to endure uncertainty.

“Tell me,” she cried, trembling from head to foot, the blood rushing over her face, “did I go to your room last night?”

“Dona Chonita!” he exclaimed.  “What an extraordinary question!  You have been dreaming.”

XXIII.

We went to a bull-fight that day, danced that night, meriendaed and danced again; a siesta in the afternoon, a few hours’ sleep in the night, refreshing us all.  Chonita, alone, looked pale, but I knew that her pallor was not due to weariness.  And I knew that she was beginning to fear Estenega; the time was almost come when she would fear herself more.  Estenega had several talks apart with her.  He managed it without any apparent maneuvering; but he always had the devil’s methods.  Valencia avenged herself by flirting desperately with Reinaldo, and Prudencia’s honeymoon was seasoned with gall.

On Saturday night Chonita stole from her guests, donned a black gown and reboso, and, attended by two Indian servants, went up to the Mission to confession.  As she left the church a half-hour later, and came down the steps, Estenega rose from a bench beneath the arches of the corridor and joined her.