“Nonsense!  Old Ambrosio is not so stupid as to refuse his daughter such a chance as I can give her!”

For Colonel Kate, with all her cleverness, had never measured, or even imagined, the world-wide difference between the view-points of a pueblo chief and an ambitious white woman.  So she felt happy and secure, as she smiled in response to one of Barbara’s bright glances, and noticed that Lieutenant Wemple was still dancing close attendance upon her young friend.

Barbara was gowned very simply in white, and carried a bouquet of Jacqueminot roses.  Her shining black hair was drawn back from her forehead in loose, waving masses and filleted with bands of silver filigree.  The brown-faced girl, in her white dress with the glowing roses at her breast, made a pleasing picture as she stood beside a cabinet of pueblo pottery, against a Navajo portiere.  Lieutenant Wemple, who stood nearest her, thought that, altogether, it made the most striking and suggestive composition he had ever seen, and that he would like to see her portrait painted just as she stood there; but that would be impossible, for no artist could paint two girls into one figure.  And she—­at one moment she was a bronze figure, listening with drooped eyelids, closed lips, and impassive face, and the next she was vibrant with life; her big black eyes, which would have redeemed a countenance of less attractiveness than hers, sparkled and glowed; her face was radiant with eager interest; and the Lieutenant felt that beneath those rich red roses must beat a heart as glowing with warm bright life as they.

Santa Fe might be, geographically, far in the deeps of the red and woolly West, but the feminine portion of its social circles did not think that any reason why they should relapse into barbarism.  And as one means of preventing such a dire catastrophe, they made the law of party calls even as the laws of the Medes and Persians.  Among themselves the men might groan and swear and protest as much as they pleased, but if any one of them neglected that duty the ladies forthwith hurled him from the circles of the Select into the outer shades of the Unassorted.  After the night of Barbara’s success these calls did not lag as usual, and Lieutenant Wemple, who was wont to be the last, was the very first to present himself.

Then followed a series of gayeties in which Barbara was the central figure, and Lieutenant Wemple her constant attendant.  Whether it was a dinner, or a reception, or a picnic party up the canyon, or a horseback excursion to the turquoise mines, he spent as much time by her side as the other people allowed.  Barbara enjoyed it all with the zest of a mortal let loose in wonderland, and thought that nowhere else in the world could there be such delightful people as her new friends.  It seemed to her that she had at last come into her own inheritance and found the people among whom she really belonged.  But she liked best of all the quiet afternoons at home, when she and Mrs. Coolidge sat in the placita, and Lieutenant Wemple came, and they three read and talked together.