d, aged woman, silent, unsmiling,
placid-faced, who manoeuvred with her son and her head shepherd alike,
to bring it about that a handful of Indians might once more confess
their sins to a Franciscan monk in the Moreno chapel.

III

JUAN CANITO and Senor Felipe were not the only members of the Senora's
family who were impatient for the sheep-shearing. There was also Ramona.
Ramona was, to the world at large, a far more important person than the
Senora herself. The Senora was of the past; Ramona was of the present.
For one eye that could see the significant, at times solemn, beauty of
the Senora's pale and shadowed countenance, there were a hundred that
flashed with eager pleasure at the barest glimpse of Ramona's face; the
shepherds, the herdsmen, the maids, the babies, the dogs, the poultry,
all loved the sight of Ramona; all loved her, except the Senora. The
Senora loved her not; never had loved her, never could love her; and
yet she had stood in the place of mother to the girl ever since her
childhood, and never once during the whole sixteen years of her life had
shown her any unkindness in act. She had promised to be a mother to her;
and with all the inalienable stanchness of her nature she fulfilled the
letter of her promise. More than the bond lay in the bond; but that was
not the Senora's fault.

The story of Ramona the Senora never told. To most of the Senora's
acquaintances now, Ramona was a mystery. They did not know--and no one
ever asked a prying question of the Senora Moreno--who Ramona's parents
were, whether they were living or dead, or why Ramona, her name not
being Moreno, lived always in the Senora's house as a daughter, tended
and attended equally with the adored Felipe. A few gray-haired men and
women here and there in the country could have told the strange story
of Ramona; but its beginning was more than a half-century back, and much
had happened since then. They seldom thought of the child. They knew she
was in the Senora Moreno's keeping, and that was enough. The affairs of
the generation just going out were not the business of the young people
coming in. They would have tragedies enough of their own presently; what
was the use of passing down the old ones? Yet the story was not one to
be forgotten; and now and then it was told in the twilight of a summer
evening, or in the shadows of vines on a lingering afternoon, and all
young men and maidens thrilled who heard it.

It was an elder s