y, last time. Keep on writing often, you know, it's the next thing to
seeing you."

He wrote that note the night after he broke a track record in
California, wrote it on the chiffonier of the hotel bedroom while making
ready to attend a motor club dinner at which he was to be chief guest in
honor of the day's event. Four weeks later Flavia read it, under the
flowering almond trees that surrounded the house so closely as to
overhang the balcony on which she sat. Read it, then kissed the
careless, boyish _Corwin B. Rose_ that slanted crookedly across the foot
of the page. Holding the letter, she sat quite still.

From the room within drifted the voices of Mr. Rose and the mild Father
Bartolome, between whom the last months had established a cordial basis
of esteem. The village priest had dined with them; it was in deference
to his presence that Flavia wore a gown whose lace collar came up to her
round chin, and now had left the two gentlemen to after-dinner
conversation instead of herself entertaining her father. She had the
sense of being horribly alone; her longing for Corrie became physical
pain, so that she crushed the letter in her fingers, catching her breath
with difficulty. Close to one another they always had been, still closer
together trouble had drawn them, but now half the world stretched its
empty spaces between. The impulse that goaded her was to cry out to her
father that she must see Corrie--to take her to him--yet she did not
speak or move, resolute in endurance. To make that appeal to her father
would be to separate Corrie from Allan Gerard, she knew, to bring her
brother back to the atmosphere of constraint and reproach to escape
which he had left the rose-colored Long Island villa they called home.

"Taxes are taxes," Mr. Rose's raised accents set forth. "Governments
have to be maintained. If the tax collector is due to-morrow, Val de
Rosas has got to pay up."

There was a murmured reply in the softer tones.

"No money?" the American echoed. "I suppose I could guess that." There
came the crisp sound of parting paper. "Now, if you will make a figure
for the total, Father, I'll give you this check to pay for the whole
thing. I've lived in this town five months, and I like the people--it's
my treat. No, I haven't counted the chickens and measured the houses,
but I can see the amount isn't exactly ruinous. Now, we won't talk any
more about it; here you are."

"Senor Rose," solemnly said the old man,