She understood his meaning and, though a thrill of excitement ran through her blood, answered laughingly: 

“Shall a woman learn from the desert?  Have I been such a chatter-box, Mrs. Engle, that I am to be admonished at the beginning to study to hold my tongue?”

Florence looked at her curiously, turned toward Norton, and then went with him to the door.  For a moment their voices came in a murmur down the hallway; then Norton had gone and Florence returned slowly to the living-room.

Again Virginia looked out into the patio.  Never a twig stirred now; all was as quiet as the sleeping fountain, as silent and mystery-filled as the desert itself.  Had Roderick Norton seen more than she?  Did he know who had been out there?  Was here the beginning of some further sinister outgrowth of the lawlessness of Kid Rickard? of the animosity of Jim Galloway?  Was she presently to see Norton himself slipping into the patio from the other side, was she again to hear the rattle of pistol-shots?  He had asked that she say nothing; she had unhesitatingly given him her promise.  Had she so unquestioningly done as he had requested because he was the sheriff who represented the law? or because he was Roderick Norton who stood for fine, upstanding manhood? . . .  Again she felt Florence Engle’s eyes fixed upon her.

“Florence is prepared at the beginning to dislike me,” she thought.  “Why?  Just because I walked with him from the hotel?”

In the heat of an argument with Mrs. Engle there came an interruption.  The banker’s wife was insisting that Virginia “do the only sensible thing in the world,” that she accept a home under the Engle roof, occupying the room already made ready for her.  Virginia, warmed by the cordial invitation, while deeply grateful, felt that she had no right to accept.  She had come to San Juan to make her own way; she had no claim upon the hospitality of her kinswoman, certainly no such claim as was implied now.  Besides, there was Elmer Page.  Her brother was coming to join her to-morrow or the next day, and as soon as it could be arranged they would take a house all by themselves, or if that proved impossible, would have a suite at the hotel.  At the moment when it seemed that a deadlock had come between Mrs. Engle’s eagerness to mother her cousin’s daughter and Virginia’s inborn sense of independence, the interruption came.

It arrived in the form of a boy of ten or twelve, a ragged, scantily clothed, swarthy youngster, rubbing a great toe against a bare leg while from the front door he announced that Ignacio Chavez was sick, that he had eaten something muy malo, that he had pains and that he prayed that the doctor cure him.

Patten grunted his disgust.

“Tell him to wait,” he said briefly.  And, in explanation to the others:  “There’s nothing the matter with him.  I saw him on the street just before I came.  And wasn’t he ringing his bell not fifteen minutes ago?”