aid Maruju. "What would you? We can not select HIS
acquaintances; we can hardly choose our own," she added, sweetly.

The Doctor hesitated, as if to reply, and then, with a grim
"Good-morning," passed on towards the patio. Maruja did not follow
him. Her attention was suddenly absorbed by a hitherto unnoticed
motionless figure, that seemed to be hiding in the shadow of an angle
of the passage, as if waiting for her to pass. The keen eyes of the
daughter of Joseph Saltonstall were not deceived. She walked directly
towards the figure, and said, sharply, "Pereo!"

The figure came hesitatingly forward into the light of the grated
window. It was that of an old man, still tall and erect, though the
hair had disappeared from his temples, and hung in two or three
straight, long dark elf-locks on his neck. His face, over which one of
the bars threw a sinister shadow, was the yellow of a dried
tobacco-leaf, and veined as strongly. His garb was a strange mingling
of the vaquero and the ecclesiastic--velvet trousers, open from the
knee down, and fringed with bullion buttons; a broad red sash around
his waist, partly hidden by a long, straight chaqueta; with a circular
sacerdotal cape of black broadcloth slipped over his head through a
slit-like opening braided with gold. His restless yellow eyes fell
before the young girl's; and the stiff, varnished, hard-brimmed
sombrero he held in his wrinkled hands trembled.

"You are spying again, Pereo," said Maruja, in another dialect than the
one she had used to her mother. "It is unworthy of my father's trusted
servant."

"It is that man--that coyote, Dona Maruja, that is unworthy of your
father, of your mother, of YOU!" he gesticulated, in a fierce whisper.
"I, Pereo, do not spy. I follow, follow the track of the prowling,
stealing brute until I run him down. Yes, it was I, Pereo, who warned
your father he would not be content with the half of the land he stole!
It was I, Pereo, who warned your mother that each time he trod the soil
of La Mision Perdida he measured the land he could take away!" He
stopped pantingly, with the insane abstraction of a fixed idea
glittering in his eyes.

"And it was YOU, Pereo," she said, caressingly, laying her soft hand on
his heaving breast, "YOU who carried me in your arms when I was a
child. It was you, Pereo, who took me before you on your pinto horse
to the rodeo, when no one knew it but ourselves, my Pereo, was it not?"
He nodded his