hich Garda was very fond.
It had once been thinly coated over with silver, and it had every
appearance of having been made to hang before a shrine; there was a
tradition, indeed, that though it had been at East Angels longer than
even the Old Madam could remember, it had come originally from that East
Mission of Our Lady of the Angels which had given the Duero house its
name; the lamp remained, though the little coquina shrine, built for the
red-skins, had vanished.

Raquel knew how to make a particular kind of oil, highly perfumed with
fragrant gums; she made this, in small quantities at a time, for Garda,
who burned it in this lamp in her own room, and greatly enjoyed the
aromatic odor it gave out. Margaret had remonstrated with her for the
fancy. "I cannot think it is wholesome," she said, "to sleep in such a
heavily perfumed atmosphere."

"I sleep a great deal better in it than I ever do in your plain, thin,
_whitewashed_ sort of air," Garda had responded, laughing.

To-night, after lighting her candle, she lighted this lamp also.

"It's burning!" she said, calling through the closed door between their
two rooms with childlike defiance. But she got no answer.

CHAPTER XXII.

That same evening Evert Winthrop was watching the storm on the St.
John's River. It had begun to darken the north-western sky before
sunset; rising higher and higher, at length it had come sweeping down
the broad stream. First the broken lurid edge (like little puffs of
white smoke) of the blackness that followed behind; and that was the
wind. Then the blackness itself, pierced here and there by lightning.
Then, last, in perpendicular columns extending from the sky to the
smooth water below (water that had been pressed flat by wind that had
gone on before), the rain falling straight downward densely and softly;
the line across the river made by the advancing drops on one side and
the smooth water which they had not yet reached on the other, was as
distinct as one made across a piece of velvet when one half of its nap
has been turned sharply back, while the other remains undisturbed.

The old white house, once a private residence, where Winthrop was
spending the night, was now a reluctant hotel; that is, inmates were
received there, and allowed to find their way about, to sit round a
brilliant light-wood fire on the broad hearth of the pleasant old parlor
on cold evenings, to bask in the sunshine on the piazzas during the day,
or