a strange joy, "do
you say that you--YOU yourself, care nothing for this?"

"Nothing," he answered, gazing at her transfigured face with admiring
wonder.

"And"--more timidly, as a faint aurora kindled in her checks--"that you
don't care--that--that--I am coming to you WITH A NAME, to give you
in--exchange?"

He started.

"Yerba, you are not mocking me? You will be my wife?"

She smiled, yet moving softly backwards with the grave stateliness of a
vanishing yet beckoning goddess, until she reached the sumach-bush from
which she had emerged. He followed. Another backward step, and it
yielded to let her through; but even as it did so she caught him in her
arms, and for a single moment it closed upon them both, and hid them in
its glory. A still lingering song-bird, possibly convinced that he had
mistaken the season, and that spring had really come, flew out with a
little cry to carry the message south; but even then Paul and Yerba
emerged with such innocent, childlike gravity, and, side by side,
walked so composedly towards the house, that he thought better of it.

CHAPTER IX.

It was only the THIRD time they had ever met--did Paul consider that
when he thought her cold? Did he know now why she had not understood
him at Rosario? Did he understand now how calculating and selfish he
had seemed to her that night? Could he look her in the face now--no,
he must be quiet--they were so near the house, and everybody could see
them!--and say that he had ever believed her capable of making up that
story of the Arguellos? Could he not have guessed that she had some
memory of that name in her childish recollections, how or where she
knew not? Was it strange that a daughter should have an instinct of
her father? Was it kind to her to know all this himself and yet reveal
nothing? Because her mother and father had quarreled, and her mother
had run away with somebody and left her a ward to strangers--was that
to be concealed from her, and she left without a name? This, and much
more, tenderly reproachful, bewildering and sweetly illogical, yet
inexpressibly dear to Paul, as they walked on in the gloaming.

More to the purpose, however, the fact that Briones, as far as she
knew, did not know her mother, and never before the night at Strudle
Bad had ever spoken of her. Still more to the purpose, that he had
disappeared after an interview with the colonel that night, and that
she believed always that the colonel ha