“But you already have the Commander’s chickens—­which you are bringing up as swans, by the way,” said Hurlstone mischievously.  “You wouldn’t surely abandon the nest again?”

“You are laughing at me,” said Miss Keene, putting on a slight pout to hide the vague pleasure that Hurlstone’s gayer manner was giving her.  “But, really, I’ve been thinking that the Presidio children are altogether too pretty and picturesque for me, and that I enjoy them too much to do them any good.  It’s like playing with them, you know!”

Hurlstone laughed, but suddenly looking down upon her face he was struck with its youthfulness.  She had always impressed him before—­through her reserve and independence—­as older, and more matured in character.  He did not know how lately she was finding her lost youth as he asked her, quite abruptly, if she ever had any little brothers and sisters.

The answer to this question involved the simple story of Miss Keene’s life, which she gave with naive detail.  She told him of her early childhood, and the brother who was only an indistinct memory; of her school days, and her friendships up to the moment of her first step into the great world that was so strangely arrested at Todos Santos.  He was touched with the almost pathetic blankness of this virgin page.  Encouraged by his attention, and perhaps feeling a sympathy she had lately been longing for, she confessed to him the thousand little things which she had reserved from even Mrs. Markham during her first apathetic weeks at Todos Santos.

“I’m sure I should have been much happier if I had had any one to talk to,” she added, looking up into his face with a naivete of faint reproach; “it’s very different for men, you know.  They can always distract themselves with something.  Although,” she continued hesitatingly, “I’ve sometimes thought you would have been happier if you had had somebody to tell your troubles to—­I don’t mean the Padre; for, good as he is, he is a foreigner, you know, and wouldn’t look upon things as we do—­but some one in sympathy with you.”

She stopped, alarmed at the change of expression in his face.  A quick flush had crossed his cheek; for an instant he had looked suspiciously into her questioning eyes.  But the next moment the idea of his quietly selecting this simple, unsophisticated girl as the confidant of his miserable marriage, and the desperation that had brought him there, struck him as being irresistibly ludicrous and he smiled.  It was the first time that the habitual morbid intensity of his thoughts on that one subject had ever been disturbed by reaction; it was the first time that a clear ray of reason had pierced the gloom in which he had enwrapped it.  Seeing him smile, the young girl smiled too.  Then they smiled together vaguely and sympathetically, as over some unspoken confidence.  But, unknown and unsuspected by himself, that smile had completed his emancipation and triumph.  The next moment, when he sought with a conscientious sigh to reenter his old mood, he was half shocked to find it gone.  Whatever gradual influence—­the outcome of these few months of rest and repose—­may have already been at work to dissipate his clouded fancy, he was only vaguely conscious that the laughing breath of the young girl had blown it away forever.