Not so Juanita.  Her black eyes snapped suddenly with suspicion, she drew in her breath, and closed her little mouth firmly.  Then she began a crescendo.

Mother of God! was that all?  Was he a child, to be sent away for such time or for such purpose as best pleased the fathers?  Was he to know no more than that?  With such gifts as God had given him, was he not at least to have some word in disposing of them?  Ah! she would not stand it.

The boy gazed admiringly at the piquant energy of the little figure before him, and envied her courage.  “It is the mestizo blood,” he murmured to himself.  Then aloud, “Thou shouldst have been a man, ’Nita.”

“And thou a woman.”

“Or a priest.  Eh, what is that?”

They had both risen, Juanita defiantly, her black braids flying as she wheeled and suddenly faced the thicket, Francisco clinging to her with trembling hands and whitened lips.  A stone, loosened from the hillside, had rolled to their feet; there was a crackling in the alders on the slope above them.

“Is it a bear, or a brigand?” whispered Francisco, hurriedly, sounding the uttermost depths of his terror in the two words.

“It is an eavesdropper,” said Juanita, impetuously; “and who and why, I intend to know,” and she started towards the thicket.

“Do not leave me, good Juanita;” said the young acolyte, grasping the girl’s skirt.

“Nay; run to the hacienda quickly, and leave me to search the thicket.  Run!”

The boy did not wait for a second injunction, but scuttled away, his long coat catching in the brambles, while Juanita darted like a kitten into the bushes.  Her search was fruitless, however, and she was returning impatiently, when her quick eye fell upon a letter lying amid the dried grass where she and Francisco had been seated the moment before.  It had evidently fallen from his breast when he had risen suddenly, and been overlooked in his alarm.  It was Father Pedro’s letter to the Father Superior of San Jose.

In an instant she had pounced upon it as viciously as if it had been the interloper she was seeking.  She knew that she held in her fingers the secret of Francisco’s sudden banishment.  She felt instinctively that this yellowish envelope, with its red string and its blotch of red seal, was his sentence and her own.  The little mestizo, had not been brought up to respect the integrity of either locks or seals, both being unknown in the patriarchal life of the hacienda.  Yet with a certain feminine instinct she looked furtively around her, and even managed to dislodge the clumsy wax without marring the pretty effigy of the crossed keys impressed upon it.  Then she opened the letter and read.