eyes lifted in
gentle reverence to the Father's face, and his face full of affectionate
welcome, Ramona thought to herself, as she had thought hundreds of times
since she became a woman, "How beautiful Felipe is! No wonder the Senora
loves him so much! If I had been beautiful like that she would have
liked me better." Never was a little child more unconscious of her own
beauty than Ramona still was. All the admiration which was expressed
to her in word and look she took for simple kindness and good-will.
Her face, as she herself saw it in her glass, did not please her. She
compared her straight, massive black eyebrows with Felipe's, arched and
delicately pencilled, and found her own ugly. The expression of gentle
repose which her countenance wore, seemed to her an expression of
stupidity. "Felipe looks so bright!" she thought, as she noted his
mobile changing face, never for two successive seconds the same. "There
is nobody like Felipe." And when his brown eyes were fixed on her, as
they so often were, in a long lingering gaze, she looked steadily back
into their velvet depths with an abstracted sort of intensity which
profoundly puzzled Felipe. It was this look, more than any other one
thing, which had for two years held Felipe's tongue in leash, as it
were, and made it impossible for him to say to Ramona any of the loving
things of which his heart had been full ever since he could remember.
The boy had spoken them unhesitatingly, unconsciously; but the man found
himself suddenly afraid. "What is it she thinks when she looks into my
eyes so?" he wondered. If he had known that the thing she was usually
thinking was simply, "How much handsomer brown eyes are than blue!
I wish my eyes were the color of Felipe's!" he would have perceived,
perhaps, what would have saved him sorrow, if he had known it, that a
girl who looked at a man thus, would be hard to win to look at him as a
lover. But being a lover, he could not see this. He saw only enough to
perplex and deter him.

As they drew near the house, Ramona saw Margarita standing at the gate
of the garden. She was holding something white in her hands, looking
down at it, and crying piteously. As she perceived Ramona, she made an
eager leap forward, and then shrank back again, making dumb signals
of distress to her. Her whole attitude was one of misery and entreaty.
Margarita was, of all the maids, most beloved by Ramona. Though they
were nearly of the same age, it had been