did he say?" asked the Senora, with a look in her eye which boded
no good to Juan Canito.

"It was not to me he said it, it was to Luigo; but I heard him,"
answered Ramona, speaking slowly, as if collecting her various
reminiscences on the subject. "Twice I heard him. He said that my mother
was no good, and that my father was bad too." And the tears rolled down
the child's cheeks.

The Senora's sense of justice stood her well in place of tenderness,
now. Caressing the little orphan as she had never before done, she said,
with an earnestness which sank deep into the child's mind, "Ramona must
not believe any such thing as that. Juan Can is a bad man to say it.
He never saw either your father or your mother, and so he could know
nothing about them. I knew your father very well. He was not a bad man.
He was my friend, and the friend of the Senora Ortegna; and that was the
reason he gave you to the Senora Ortegna, because she had no child of
her own. And I think your mother had a good many."

"Oh!" said Ramona, relieved, for the moment, at this new view of the
situation,--that the gift had been not as a charity to her, but to the
Senora Ortegna. "Did the Senora Ortegna want a little daughter very
much?"

"Yes, very much indeed," said the Senora, heartily and with fervor. "She
had grieved many years because she had no child."

Silence again for a brief space, during which the little lonely heart,
grappling with its vague instinct of loss and wrong, made wide thrusts
into the perplexities hedging it about, and presently electrified the
Senora by saying in a half-whisper, "Why did not my father bring me to
you first? Did he know you did not want any daughter?"

The Senora was dumb for a second; then recovering herself, she said:
"Your father was the Senora Ortegna's friend more than he was mine. I
was only a child, then."

"Of course you did not need any daughter when you had Felipe," continued
Ramona, pursuing her original line of inquiry and reflection without
noticing the Senora's reply. "A son is more than a daughter; but most
people have both," eying the Senora keenly, to see what response this
would bring.

But the Senora was weary and uncomfortable with the talk. At the very
mention of Felipe, a swift flash of consciousness of her inability
to love Ramona had swept through her mind. "Ramona," she said firmly,
"while you are a little girl, you cannot understand any of these things.
When you are a woman, I will