It was true enough that he went to the house of Ramon to "eat iron," to
"pluck the turkey," to "hold the wall." But 'twas not Dolores, the wife
of Ramon, who knew of it, but pretty Andalucian Concha, the handmaiden
and companion Ramon had given his wife when they were first married.
Concha was niece to the priest's Manuela, a slim sloe-eyed witty thing,
light of heart and foot as a goose feather that blows over a common on a
northerly breeze. She had had more sweethearts than she could count on
the fingers of both hands, this pleasantly accommodative maiden, and
there was little of the teaching of the happy guileful province in which
Concha needed instruction, when for health and change of scene she came
to the house of Ramon and Dolores Garcia in the upland village of
Sarria.

These were the two fairest women in all Sarria--nay, in all that border
country where, watered by the pure mountain streams, fertile Catalunia
meets stern and desolate Aragon, and the foot-hills of the Eastern
Pyrenees spurn them both farther from the snows.

Well might her lovers say there was none like her--this Concha Cabezos,
who had passed her youth in a basket at her mother's feet in the tobacco
manufactories of Sevilla, and never known a father. Tall as the tower of
Lebanon that looketh towards Damascus, well bosomed, with eyes that
promised and threatened alternate, repelled and cajoled all in one
measured heave of her white throat, Concha of the house of Ramon, called
"little" by that Spanish fashion of speech which would have invented a
diminutive for Minerva herself, brought fire and destruction into
Sarria. As the wildfire flashes from the east to the west, so the fame
of her beauty went abroad. Also the wit of her replies--how she had
bidden Pedro Morales (who called himself, like Don Jaime, "El
Conquistador") to bring her a passport signed at all his former houses
of call; how she had "cast out the sticks" of half the youth of the
village, till despised batons strewed the ground like potsherds. And so
the fame of little Concha went ever farther afield.

Yet when Rafael, the alcalde's son, came to the window on moonless
nights, Concha was there. Hers was the full blood, quick-running and
generous of the south, that loves in mankind a daintiness and effeminacy
which they would scorn in their own sex.

So, many were the rich golden twilights when the two lovers whispered
together beneath the broad leaves of the fig-trees, each da