“That is of your conscience!  It is that you would understand the Dona Leonor—­your dear Miss Keene—­better!  Ah! silence, imbecile! this Dona Barbara is even as thou art—­a talking parrot.  She will have that the Comandante’s secretary, Manuel, shall marry Mees Chubb, and that the Doctor shall marry my sister.  But she knows not that Manuel—­listen so that you shall get sick at your heart and swallow your moustachio!—­that Manuel loves the beautiful Leonor, and that Leonor loves not him, but Don Diego; and that my sister loathes the little Doctor.  And this Dona Barbara, that makes your liver white, would be a feeder of chickens with such barley as this!  Ah! come along!”

The arrival of the Doctor and the Comandante’s secretary created another diversion, and the pairing off of the two couples indicated by Dona Isabel for a stroll in the garden, which was now beginning to recover from the still heat of mid-day.  This left Don Ramon and Mrs. Brimmer alone in the corridor; Mrs. Brimmer’s indefinite languor, generally accepted as some vague aristocratic condition of mind and body, not permitting her to join them.

There was a moment of dangerous silence; the voices of the young people were growing fainter in the distance.  Mrs. Brimmer’s eyes, in the shadow of her fan, were becoming faintly phosphorescent.  Don Ramon’s melancholy face, which had grown graver in the last few moments, approached nearer to her own.

“You are unhappy, Dona Barbara.  The coming of this young cavalier, your countryman, revives your anxiety for your home.  You are thinking of this husband who comes not.  Is it not so?”

“I am thinking,” said Mrs. Brimmer, with a sudden revulsion of solid Boston middle-class propriety, shown as much in the dry New England asperity of voice that stung even through her drawling of the Castilian speech, as in anything she said,—­“I am thinking that, unless Mr. Brimmer comes soon, I and Miss Chubb shall have to abandon the hospitality of your house, Don Ramon.  Without looking upon myself as a widow, or as indefinitely separated from Mr. Brimmer, the few words let fall by Mr. Brace show me what might be the feelings of my countrymen on the subject.  However charming and considerate your hospitality has been—­and I do not deny that it has been most grateful to me—­I feel I cannot continue to accept it in those equivocal circumstances.  I am speaking to a gentleman who, with the instincts and chivalrous obligations of his order, must sympathize with my own delicacy in coming to this conclusion, and who will not take advantage of my confession that I do it with pain.”

She spoke with a dry alacrity and precision so unlike her usual languor and the suggestions of the costume, and even the fan she still kept shading her faintly glowing eyes, that the man before her was more troubled by her manner than her words, which he had but imperfectly understood.

“You will leave here—­this house?” he stammered.