perpetuated itself year after year, until it was
half suffocated in its own overgrowth and strangled with its own beauty,
spread over a variegated expanse of starry flowers, shimmering leaves,
and slender inextricable branches, pierced here and there by towering
rigid cactus spikes or the curved plumes of palms. The repose of ages
lay in its hushed groves, its drooping vines, its lifeless creepers;
the dry dust of its decaying leaves and branches mingled with the living
perfumes like the spiced embalmings of a forgotten past.

Nevertheless, this tranquillity, after a few moments, was singularly
disturbed. There was no breeze stirring, and yet the long fronds of a
large fan palm, that stood near the breach in the wall, began to move
gently from right to left, like the arms of some graceful semaphore,
and then as suddenly stopped. Almost at the same moment a white curtain,
listlessly hanging from a canopied balcony of the Alcalde's house, began
to exhibit a like rhythmical and regular agitation. Then everything was
motionless again; an interval of perfect peace settled upon the garden.
It was broken by the apparition of Brace under the balcony, and the
black-veiled and flowered head of Dona Isabel from the curtain above.

"Crazy boy!"

"Senorita!"

"Hush! I am coming down!"

"You? But Dona Ursula!"

"There is no more Dona Ursula!"

"Well--your duenna, whoever she is!"

"There is no duenna!"

"What?"

"Hush up your tongue, idiot boy!" (this in English.)

The little black head and the rose on top of it disappeared. Brace drew
himself up against the wall and waited. The time seemed interminable.
Impatiently looking up and down, he at last saw Dona Isabel at a
distance, quietly and unconcernedly moving among the roses, and
occasionally stooping as if to pick them. In an instant he was at her
side.

"Let me help you," he said.

She opened her little brownish palm,--

"Look!" In her hand were a few leaves of some herb. "It is for you."

Brace seized and kissed the hand.

"Is it some love-test?"

"It is for what you call a julep-cocktail," she replied gravely. "He
will remain in a glass with aguardiente; you shall drink him with a
straw. My sister has said that ever where the Americans go they expect
him to arrive."

"I prefer to take him straight," said Brace, laughing, as he nibbled a
limp leaf bruised by the hand of the young girl. "He's pleasanter, and,
on the whole, more wildly intoxicating this wa