, to take part
personally in the social entertainments of Gracias, she sent her husband
in her place. And this was her bravery; for he was without doubt the
most agreeable as well as the handsomest of men, and anybody with sense
could foretell what must follow: given certain conditions, and the
results all the world over were the same. Other people might say that
quiet little Gracias was safe, Mrs. Penelope Moore knew better. Other
people, again, might be blind; but Mrs. Penelope Moore was never blind.
She knew that such a man as her Middleton passed, must pass, daily
through temptations of the most incandescent nature, all the more
dangerous because merged inextricably with his priest's office; but he
passed unscathed, he came out always, as she once wrote triumphantly to
her mother, "without so much as a singe upon the hem of his uttermost
garment." And if, on the other hand, it might have seemed that so little
(blessedly) that was inflammable had been included in this good man's
composition that he might have passed safely through any amount of
incandescence, even all that his wife imagined, here again, then, others
were most decidedly mistaken; Mrs. Moore was convinced that her
Middleton was of the fieriest temperament. Only he kept it down.

Gracias-a-Dios was certainly quiet enough. But Mistress Penelope, like
many good women before her, could believe with ease in a degree of
depravity which would have startled the most hardened of actual
participants. Having no standards by which to gauge evil, no personal
experience of its nature, she was quite at sea about it. As Dr. Kirby
once said of her (when vexed by some of her small rulings), "If people
don't come to Friday morning service, sir, she thinks it but a small
step further that they should have poisoned their fathers and beaten
their wives."

On the present occasion this lady set her husband's hat straight upon
his amiable forehead, and gave him his butterfly net; then from her
Gothic windows (the rectory of St. Philip and St. James' was of the same
uncertain Gothic as the church), she watched him down the path and
through the gate, across the plaza out of sight, going back to her sofa
with the secure thought in her heart, "I can trust him--_anywhere_!"

The party on the yacht was composed of the same persons who had taken
part in most of the entertainments given for the northern ladies, save
that Manuel and Torres were absent. Torres had not been allowed to