a new and smarting significance.  Might they, too, not succeed in weaning the boy’s affection from him, or if the mother had interfered, would they not side with her in claiming an equal right?  He had sometimes laughed to himself over the security of this hiding-place, so unknown and so unlikely to be discovered by her, yet within easy reach of her friends and his enemies; he now ground his teeth over the mistake which his doting desire to keep his son accessible to him had caused him to make.  He put spurs to his horse, dashed down the little, narrow, ill-paved street, through the deserted plaza, and pulled up in a cloud of dust before the only remaining tower, with its cracked belfry, of the half-ruined Mission church.  A new dormitory and school-building had been extended from its walls, but in a subdued, harmonious, modest way, quite unlike the usual glaring white-pine glories of provincial towns.  Steptoe laughed to himself bitterly.  Some of his money had gone in it.

He seized the horsehair rope dangling from a bell by the wall and rang it sharply.  A soft-footed priest appeared,—­Father Dominico.  “Eddy Horncastle?  Ah! yes.  Eddy, dear child, is gone.”

“Gone!” shouted Steptoe in a voice that startled the padre.  “Where?  When?  With whom?”

“Pardon, senor, but for a time—­only a pasear to the next village.  It is his saint’s day—­he has half-holiday.  He is a good boy.  It is a little pleasure for him and for us.”

“Oh!” said Steptoe, softened into a rough apology.  “I forgot.  All right.  Has he had any visitors lately—­lady, for instance?”

Father Dominico cast a look half of fright, half of reproval upon his guest.

“A lady here!”

In his relief Steptoe burst into a coarse laugh.  “Of course; you see I forgot that, too.  I was thinking of one of his woman folks, you know—­relatives—­aunts.  Was there any other visitor?”

“Only one.  Ah! we know the senor’s rules regarding his son.”

“One?” repeated Steptoe.  “Who was it?”

“Oh, quite an hidalgo—­an old friend of the child’s—­most polite, most accomplished, fluent in Spanish, perfect in deportment.  The Senor Horncastle surely could find nothing to object to.  Father Pedro was charmed with him.  A man of affairs, and yet a good Catholic, too.  It was a Senor Van Loo—­Don Paul the boy called him, and they talked of the boy’s studies in the old days as if—­indeed, but for the stranger being a caballero and man of the world—­as if he had been his teacher.”

It was a proof of the intensity of the father’s feelings that they had passed beyond the power of his usual coarse, brutal expression, and he only stared at the priest with a dull red face in which the blood seemed to have stagnated.  Presently he said thickly, “When did he come?”

“A few days ago.”

“Which way did Eddy go?”

“To Brown’s Mills, scarcely a league away.  He will be here—­even now—­on the instant.  But the senor will come into the refectory and take some of the old Mission wine from the Catalan grape, planted one hundred and fifty years ago, until the dear child returns.  He will be so happy.”