losed
the door touched his hat, not to the Sarrions but to her; and she
returned the salutation with a friendly smile.

"Where are we going?" she asked after a pause.

"To the Casa Sarrion," was the reply.

"Is it open, after all these years?"

"Yes," answered Sarrion.

"But why?"

"For you," answered Sarrion.

Juanita turned and looked out of the window, with bright and thoughtful
eyes. She asked no more questions and they drove to the Palacio Sarrion
in silence.

There they found Cousin Peligros awaiting them.

Cousin Peligros was a Sarrion and seemed in some indefinite way to
consider that in so being and so existing she placed the world under an
obligation. That she considered the world bound, in return for the honour
she conferred upon it, to support her in comfort and deference was a
patent fact hardly worth putting into words.

"The old families," she was in the habit of saying with a sigh, "are
dying out."

At the same time she made a little gesture with outspread palms, and
folded her white hands complacently on her lap as if to indicate that
society was not left comfortless--that she was still there. From her
inferiors she looked for the utmost deference. Her white hands had never
done an hour's work. She was ignorant and idle; but she was a lady and a
Sarrion.

Cousin Peligros lived in a little apartment in Madrid, which she fondly
imagined to be the hub of the social universe.

"They all come," she said, "to consult the Senorita de Sarrion upon
points of etiquette."

And she patted the air condescendingly with her left hand. There are some
people who seem to be created by a far-seeing Providence as a solemn
warning.

"Cousin Peligros," said Juanita one day, after listening respectfully to
a lecture on the care of the hands, "lives in a little field of her own."

"Like a scarecrow," added Marcos, the taciturn.

And this was the lady who awaited them at the Palacio Sarrion. She had
been summoned from Madrid by Sarrion, who paid the expenses of the
journey; no small item, by the way. For Cousin Peligros, like many people
who live at the expense of others, sought to mitigate the bitterness of
the bread of charity by spreading it very thickly with other people's
butter.

She did not come down to the door to meet them when the carriage
clattered over the cobble-stones of the echoing patio.

Such a proceeding might have lowered her dignity in the eyes of the
servants, who, to do them just