“Ah, imbecile!” said Dona Isabel, pouncing upon Eleanor Keene like an affectionate panther.  “They have said you were on the seashore, and I fly for you as a bird.  Tell to me quick,” she whispered, hastily putting her own little brown ear against Miss Keene’s mouth, “immediatamente, are you much happy?”

“Where is Mr. Brace?” said Miss Keene, trying to effect a diversion, as she laughed and struggled to get free from her tormentor.

“He, the idiot boy!  Naturally, when he is for use, he comes not.  But as a maniac—­ever!  I would that I have him no more.  You will to me presently give your—­brother!  I have since to-day a presentimiento that him I shall love!  Ah!”

She pressed her little brown fist, still tightly clutching her fan, against her low bodice, as if already transfixed with a secret and absorbing passion.

“Well, you shall have Dick then,” said Miss Keene, laughing; “but was it for that you were seeking me?”

“Mother of God! you know not then what has happened?  You are a blind—­a deaf—­to but one thing all the time?  Ah!” she said quickly, unfolding her fan and modestly diving her little head behind it, “I have ashamed for you, Miss Keene.”

“But what has happened?” said Hurlstone, interposing to relieve his companion.  “We fancied something”—­

“Something! he says something!—­ah, that something was a temblor!  An earthquake!  The earth has shaken himself.  Look!”

She pointed with her fan to the shore, where the sea had suddenly returned in a turbulence of foam and billows that was breaking over the base of the cross they had just quitted.

Miss Keene drew a quick sigh.  Dona Isabel had ducked again modestly behind her fan, but this time dragging with her other arm Miss Keene’s head down to share its discreet shadow as she whispered,—­

“And—­infatuated one!—­you two never noticed it!”

CHAPTER V.

Clouds and change.

The earthquake shock, although the first experienced by the Americans, had been a yearly phenomenon to the people of Todos Santos, and was so slight as to leave little impression upon either the low adobe walls of the pueblo or the indolent population.  “If it’s a provision of Nature for shaking up these Rip Van Winkle Latin races now and then, it’s a dead failure, as far as Todos Santos is concerned,” Crosby had said, with a yawn.  “Brace, who’s got geology on the brain ever since he struck cinnabar ore, says he isn’t sure the Injins ain’t right when they believe that the Pacific Ocean used to roll straight up to the Presidio, and there wasn’t any channel—­and that reef of rocks was upheaved in their time.  But what’s the use of it? it never really waked them up.”  “Perhaps they’re waiting for another kind of earthquake,” Winslow had responded sententiously.