st as
fast, by God, in the water!" The rigging, the fishing gear and other
trappings, were not yet aboard. But the best tackle makers along shore
were at work on them, and by the fifteenth, the whole trousseau would be
ready, and, pretty as a bride on the way to church, would she take the
water! All this and more, the Rector was saying one evening to the
circle of neighbors who, as usual, were sitting around his door.

He had invited his mother and his sister Roseta to supper that night.
Dolores was at his side. Some distance away, with his rope-seated chair
tilted back against an olive tree, and looking up at the moon through
the branches in the dreamy pose of a chromo troubadour, sat Tonet,
picking at the strings of a mandolin. On the walk in front some fish
were frying on a little earthen stove. A number of children, Pascualet
among them, were chasing a dog about in the mud of the gutters. Groups
were sitting in front of the other houses along the road, to get full
benefit of the faint breeze that was blowing off the sea. _Redeu!_ How
people must have been stewing in Valencia that night!

_Sina_ Tona was getting very old. She had "taken her jump," as she put
it. From comely buxomness she had passed abruptly into old age, and the
raw bluish light of the moon made evident that the hair on her head had
thinned, leaving a scant network of taut gray locks over her sunburned
scalp. The wrinkles now sank deep into her emaciated face while her
cheeks hung loose and baggy, and her black eyes, once the talk of the
whole shore, peered sad and faded from the folds of skin that drooped
about them. Old long before her time, and from heartbreak, mostly, the
spite and the worry that men had given her! And this she said with a nod
in Tonet's direction, but with her thoughts, almost certainly, on the
guardsman who had long before betrayed her. Besides, times had been
getting harder and harder! What the tavern now brought in was nothing,
practically. Roseta had had to go to work in the tobacco factory in
town; and every morning, with her lunch-box on her arm, she went off
along the highway to Valencia, joining the bands of pretty, bold-faced
girls who marched with tapping heels and swishing skirts to sneeze all
day in the snuff-laden air of the Old Customs House. And what a girl
Roseta had grown to be! Roseta was just the name for her! When her
mother, sometimes, looked at her out of the corners of her eyes, she
seemed to see in her a