e mind, thou shalt have her."

Andreo dared to make no protest, but he asked permission to prepare a
home for his bride. The padre gave it willingly, and the young Indian
began to make the big adobes, the bright red tiles. At the end of a
month he had built him a cabin among the willows of the rancheria, a
little apart from the others: he was in love, and association with his
fellows was distasteful. When the cabin was builded his impatience
slipped from its curb, and once more he besought the priest to allow him
to marry.

Padre Arroyo was sunning himself on the corridor of the mission,
shivering in his heavy brown robes, for the day was cold.

"Orion," he said sternly--he called all his neophytes after the
celebrities of earlier days, regardless of the names given them at the
font--"have I not told thee thou must wait a year? Do not be impatient,
my son. She will keep. Women are like apples: when they are too young,
they set the teeth on edge; when ripe and mellow, they please every
sense; when they wither and turn brown, it is time to fall from the tree
into a hole. Now go and shoot a deer for Sunday: the good padres from
San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara are coming to dine with me."

Andreo, dejected, left the padre. As he passed Pilar's window and saw a
pair of wistful black eyes behind the grating, his heart took fire. No
one was within sight. By a series of signs he made his lady understand
that he would place a note beneath a certain adobe in the wall.

Pilar, as she went to and fro under the fruit trees in the garden,
or sat on the long corridor weaving baskets, watched that adobe with
fascinated eyes. She knew that Andreo was tunnelling it, and one day a
tiny hole proclaimed that his work was accomplished. But how to get the
note? The old women's eyes were very sharp when the girls were in front
of the gratings. Then the civilizing development of Christianity
upon the heathen intellect triumphantly asserted itself. Pilar, too,
conceived a brilliant scheme. That night the padre, who encouraged any
evidence of industry, no matter how eccentric, gave her a little garden
of her own--a patch where she could raise sweet peas and Castilian
roses.

"That is well, that is well, my Nausicaa," he said, stroking her smoky
braids. "Go cut the slips and plant them where thou wilt. I will send
thee a package of sweet pea seeds."

Pilar spent every spare hour bending over her "patch"; and the hole, at
first no bigger