When the moon rose he was already in the garden.  Lingering at first in the shadow of an olive tree, he waited until the moonbeams fell on the wall and its crests of foliage.  But nothing moved among that ebony tracery; his ear was strained for the familiar tinkle of the guitar—­all was silent.  As the moon rose higher he at last boldly walked to the wall, and listened for any movement on the other side of it.  But nothing stirred.  She was evidently not coming—­his note had failed.

He was turning away sadly, but as he faced his home again he heard a light laugh beside him.  He stopped.  A black shadow stepped out from beneath his own almond tree.  He started when, with a gesture that seemed familiar to him, the upper part of the shadow seemed to fall away with a long black mantilla and the face of the young girl was revealed.

He could see now that she was clad in black lace from head to foot.  She looked taller, older, and he fancied even prettier than before.  A sudden doubt of his ability to impress her, a swift realization of all the difficulties of the attempt, and, for the first time perhaps, a dim perception of the incongruity of the situation came over him.

“I was looking for you on the wall,” he stammered.

“Madre de DIOS!” she retorted, with a laugh and her old audacity, “you would that I shall always hang there, and drop upon you like a pear when you shake the tree?  No!”

“You haven’t brought your guitar,” he continued, still more awkwardly, as he noticed that she held only a long black fan in her hand.

“For why?  You would that I play it, and when my uncle say ’Where go Pepita?  She is loss,’ someone shall say, ’Oh!  I have hear her tink-a-tink in the garden of the Americano, who lif alone.’  And then—­it ess finish!”

Masterton began to feel exceedingly uncomfortable.  There was something in this situation that he had not dreamed of.  But with the persistency of an awkward man he went on.

“But you played on the wall the other night, and tried to accompany me.”

“But that was lass night and on the wall.  I had not speak to you, you had not speak to me.  You had not sent me the leetle note by your peon.”  She stopped, and suddenly opening her fan before her face, so that only her mischievous eyes were visible, added:  “You had not asked me then to come to hear you make lof to me, Don Esteban.  That is the difference.”

The circuit preacher felt the blood rush to his face.  Anger, shame, mortification, remorse, and fear alternately strove with him, but above all and through all he was conscious of a sharp, exquisite pleasure—­that frightened him still more.  Yet he managed to exclaim: 

“No! no!  You cannot think me capable of such a cowardly trick?”

The girl started, more at the unmistakable sincerity of his utterance than at the words, whose full meaning she may have only imperfectly caught.