"Do you think I came here to talk to you through a grating? I am no
serenading Spaniard."

His eyes were blazing. Adobe is not stone. Rezanov took the light bars
in both hands and wrenched them out; then, as Concha, divided between
laughter and a sudden timidity, would have retreated, he dexterously
clasped her neck and drew her head through the embrasure. As Santiago,
who had watched Rezanov from a distance with some curiosity, saw his
sister's beautiful face emerge from the wall to disappear at once
behind another rampart, he turned abruptly on his heel and could have
wept as he thought of Pilar Ortego of Santa Barbara. But there was a
hope that he would be a cadet of the Southern Company before the year
was out, and his parents and hers were indulgent. Even as he sighed,
his own impending happiness infused him with an almost patronizing
sympathy for the twain with the wall between, and he concealed himself
among the willows that they might feel to the full the blessed
isolation of lovers. His Pilar presented him with twenty-two hostages,
and he lived to enjoy an honorable and prosperous career, but he never
forgot that night and the part he had played in one of the poignant and
happy hours of his sister's life.

Day and night a great silence reigned in the Mission valley, broken
only by the hoot of the owl, the singing of birds, the flight of horses
across the plain. Even the low huddle of Mission buildings and the few
homes beyond looked an anomaly in that vast quiet valley asleep and
unknown for so many centuries in the wide embrace of the hills. Its
jewel oasis alone made it acceptable to the Spaniard, but to Rezanov
the sandy desert, with its close companionable silences, its cool night
air sweet with the light chaste fragrance of the roses, the simple,
almost primitive, conditions environing the girl, possessed a power to
stir the depths of his emotions as no artful reinforcement to passion
had ever done. He forgot the wall. His ego melted in a sense of
complete union and happiness. Even when they returned to earth and
discussed the dubious future, he was conscious of an odd resignation,
very alien in his nature, not only to the barrier but to all the
strange conditions of his wooing. He had felt something of this
before, although less definitely, and to-night he concluded that she
had the gift of clothing the inevitable with the semblance and the
sweetness of choice; and wondered how long it woul