Enough that this tall, gaunt, broad-shouldered man arose and, overcome by a curiosity almost as childlike, slipped into the garden and glided with an Indian softness of tread toward the voice.  The moon shone full upon the ruined Mission wall tipped with clusters of dark foliage.  Half hiding, half mingling with one of them—­an indistinct bulk of light-colored huddled fleeces like an extravagant bird’s nest—­hung the unknown musician.  So intent was the performer’s preoccupation that Masterton actually reached the base of the wall immediately below the figure without attracting its attention.  But his foot slipped on the crumbling debris with a snapping of dry twigs.  There was a quick little cry from above.  He had barely time to recover his position before the singer, impulsively leaning over the parapet, had lost hers, and fell outward.  But Masterton was tall, alert, and self-possessed, and threw out his long arms.  The next moment they were full of soft flounces, a struggling figure was against his breast, and a woman’s frightened little hands around his neck.  But he had broken her fall, and almost instantly, yet with infinite gentleness, he released her unharmed, with hardly her crisp flounces crumpled, in an upright position against the wall.  Even her guitar, still hanging from her shoulder by a yellow ribbon, had bounded elastic and resounding against the wall, but lay intact at her satin-slippered feet.  She caught it up with another quick little cry, but this time more of sauciness than fear, and drew her little hand across its strings, half defiantly.

“I hope you are not hurt?” said the circuit preacher, gravely.

She broke into a laugh so silvery that he thought it no extravagance to liken it to the moonbeams that played over her made audible.  She was lithe, yet plump; barred with black and yellow and small-waisted like a pretty wasp.  Her complexion in that light was a sheen of pearl satin that made her eyes blacker and her little mouth redder than any other color could.  She was small, but, remembering the fourteen-year-old wife of the shopkeeper, he felt that, for all her childish voice and features, she was a grown woman, and a sudden shyness took hold of him.

But she looked pertly in his face, stood her guitar upright before her, and put her hands behind her back as she leaned saucily against the wall and shrugged her shoulders.

“It was the fault of you,” she said, in a broken English that seemed as much infantine as foreign.  “What for you not remain to yourself in your own casa?  So it come.  You creep so—­in the dark—­and shake my wall, and I fall.  And she,” pointing to the guitar, “is a’most broke!  And for all thees I have only make to you a serenade.  Ingrate!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Masterton quickly, “but I was curious.  I thought I might help you, and—­”

“Make yourself another cat on the wall, eh?  No; one is enough, thank you!”