Transcriber’s Note:

Minor errors in punctuation and formatting have been silently corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

The full-page illustrations are referred to, in the list provided, by a quote from the text, and the page reference is to the quote, rather than the position of the illustration in the text. In some cases, these were re-positioned to fall nearer the scene referenced.

The

Travelling Thirds

By

Gertrude Atherton

Author of

“Rulers of Kings” “The Conqueror”

“The Bell in the Fog” etc.

LONDON AND NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

1905

Copyright, 1905, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Published October, 1905.

The Travelling Thirds

I

The California cousin of the Lyman T. Moultons—a name too famous to be shorn——stood apart from the perturbed group, her feet boyishly asunder, her head thrown back. Above her hung the thick white clusters of the acacia,[1] drooping abundantly, opaque and luminous in the soft masses of green, heavy with perfume. All Lyons seemed to have yielded itself to the intoxicating fragrance of its favorite tree.

1.  The acacia of Europe is identical with the American locust.

In the Place Carnot, at least, there was not a murmur. The Moultons had hushed in thought their four variations on the aggressive American key, although perhaps insensible to the voluptuous offering of the grove. Mrs. Moulton, had her senses responded to the sweet and drowsy afternoon, would have resented the experience as immoral; and as it was her pale-blue gaze rested disapprovingly on the rapt figure of her husband’s second cousin. The short skirt and the covert coat of ungraceful length, its low pockets always inviting the hands of its owner, had roused more than once her futile protest, and to-day they seemed to hang limp with a sense of incongruity beneath the half-closed eyes and expanded nostrils of the young Californian.

It was not possible for nature to struggle triumphant through the disguise this beneficiary chose to assume, but there was an unwilling conviction in the Moulton family that when Catalina arrayed herself as other women she would blossom forth into something of a beauty. Even her stiff hat half covered her brow and rich brown hair, but her eyes, long and dark and far apart, rarely failed to arrest other eyes, immobile as was their common expression.

Always independent of her fellow-mortals, and peculiarly of her present companions, she was a happy pagan at the moment, and meditating a solitary retreat to another grove of acacias down by the Saône, when her attention was claimed by Mr. Moulton.

“Would you mind coming here a moment, Catalina?” he asked, in a voice whose roll and cadence told that he had led in family prayers these many years, if not in meeting. “After all, it is your suggestion, and I think you should present the case. I have done it very badly, and they don’t seem inclined to listen to me.”

He smiled apologetically, but there was a faint twinkle in his eye which palliated the somewhat sanctimonious expression of the lower part of his face. Blond and cherubic in youth, his countenance had grown in dignity as time changed its tints to drab and gray, reclaimed the superfluous flesh of his face, and drew the strong lines that are the half of a man’s good looks. He, too, had his hands in his pockets, and he stood in front of his wife and daughters, who sat on a bench in the perfumed shade of the acacias.

His cousin once removed dragged down her eyes and scowled, without attempt at dissimulation. In a moment, however, she came forward with a manifest attempt to be human and normal. Mrs. Moulton stiffened her spine as if awaiting an assault, and her oldest daughter, a shade more formal and correct, more afraid of doing the wrong thing, fixed a cold and absent eye upon the statue to liberty in the centre of the Place. Only the second daughter, Lydia, just departing from her first quarter-century, turned to the alien relative with a sparkle in her eye. She was a girl about whose pink-and-white-and-golden prettiness there was neither question nor enthusiasm, and her thin, graceful figure and alertly poised head received such enhancement as her slender purse afforded. She wore—need I record it?—a travelling-suit of dark-blue brilliantine, short—but at least three inches longer than Catalina’s—and a large hat about whose brim fluttered a blue veil. She admired and a little feared the recent acquisition from California, experiencing for the first time in her life a pleasing suspense in the vagaries of an unusual character. She and all that hitherto pertained to her belonged to that highly refined middle class nowhere so formal and exacting as in the land of the free.

Catalina, who never permitted her relatives to suspect that she was shy, assumed her most stolid expression and abrupt tones.

“It is simple enough. We can go to Spain if we travel third class, and we can’t if we don’t. I want to see Spain more than any country in Europe. I have heard you say more than once that you were wild to see it—the Alhambra and all that—well, anxious, then,” as Mrs. Moulton raised a protesting eyebrow. “I’m wild, if you like. I’d walk, go on mule-back; in short, I’ll go alone if you won’t take me.”

“You will do what?” The color came into Mrs. Moulton’s faded cheek, and she squared herself as for an encounter. Open friction was infrequent, for Mrs. Moulton was nothing if not diplomatic, and Catalina was indifferent. Nevertheless, encounters there had been, and at the finish the Californian had invariably held the middle of the field, insolent and victorious; and Mrs. Moulton had registered a vow that sooner or later she would wave the colors over the prostrate foe.

For thirty-two years she had merged, submerged, her individuality, but in these last four months she had been possessed by a waxing revolt, of an almost passionate desire for a victorious moment. It was her first trip abroad, and she had followed where her energetic husband and daughters listed. Hardly once had she been consulted. Perhaps, removed for the first time from the stultifying environment of habit, she had come to realize what slight rewards are the woman’s who flings her very soul at the feet of others. It was too late to attempt to be an individual in her own family; even did she find the courage she must continue to accept their excessive care—she had a mild form of invalidism—and endeavor to feel grateful that she was owned by the kindest of husbands, and daughters no more selfish than the average; but since the advent of Catalina all the rebellion left in her had become compact and alert. Here was an utterly antagonistic temperament, one beyond her comprehension, individual in a fashion that offended every sensibility; cool, wary, insolently suggesting that she purposed to stalk through life in that hideous get-up, pursuing the unorthodox. She was not only indomitable youth but indomitable savagery, and Mrs. Moulton, of the old and cold Eastern civilization, bristled with a thrill that was almost rapture whenever this unwelcome relative of her husband stared at her in contemptuous silence.

“You will do what? The suggestion that we travel third class is offensive enough—but are you aware that Spanish women never travel even first class alone?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with me. I’m not Spanish; they would assume that I was ‘no lady’ and take no further notice of me; or, if they did—well, I can take care of myself. As for travelling third class, I can’t see that it is any more undignified than travelling second, and its chief recommendations, after its cheapness, are that it won’t be so deadly respectable as second, and that we’ll meet nice, dirty, picturesque, excitable peasants instead of dowdy middle-class people who want all the windows shut. The third-class carriages are generally big, open cars like ours, with wooden seats—no microbes—and at this time of the year all the windows will be open. Now, you can think it over. I am going to invest twenty francs in a Baedeker and study my route.”

She nodded to Mr. Moulton, dropped an almost imperceptible eyelash at Lydia, and, ignoring the others, strode off belligerently towards the Place Bellecour.

Mrs. Moulton turned white. She set her lips. “I shall not go,” she announced.

“My love,” protested her husband, mildly, “I am afraid she has placed us in a position where we shall have to go.” He was secretly delighted. “Spain, as you justly remarked, is the most impossible country in Europe for the woman alone, and she is the child of my dead cousin and old college chum. When we are safely home again I shall have a long talk with her and arrive at a definite understanding of this singular character, but over here I cannot permit her to make herself—and us—notorious. I am sure you will agree with me, my love. My only fear is that you may find the slow trains and wooden seats fatiguing—although I shall buy an extra supply of air-cushions, and we will get off whenever you feel tired.”

“Do say yes, mother,” pleaded her youngest born. “It will almost be an adventure, and I’ve never had anything approaching an adventure in my life. I’m sure even Jane will enjoy it.”

“I loathe travelling,” said the elder Miss Moulton, with energy. “It’s nothing but reading Baedeker, stalking through churches and picture-galleries, and rushing for trains, loaded down with hand-baggage. I feel as if I never wanted to see another thing in my life. Of course I’m glad I’ve seen London and Paris and Rome, but the discomforts and privations of travel far outweigh the advantages. I haven’t the slightest desire to see Spain, or any more down-at-the-heel European countries; America will satisfy me for the rest of my life. As for travelling third class—the very idea is low and horrid. It is bad enough to travel second, and if we did think so little of ourselves as to travel third—just think of its being found out! Where would our social position be—father’s great influence? As for that California savage, the mere fact that she makes a suggestion—”

“My dear,” remonstrated her father, “Catalina is a most well-conducted young woman. She has not given me a moment of anxiety, and I think her suggestion a really opportune one, for it will enable us to see Spain and give me much valuable literary material. Of course, I do not like the idea of travelling third class myself, and I only wish I could afford to take you all in the train de luxe.”

“You are a perfect dear,” announced Lydia, “and give us everything we want. And if we went in the luxe we couldn’t see any nice little out-of-the-way places and would soon become blasé, which would be dreadful. Jane at first enjoyed it as much as we did, and I could go on forever. No one need ever know that we went third, and when we are at home we will have something else to talk about except the ever-lasting Italy and England and Paris. Do consent, mother.”

This was an unusual concession, and Mrs. Moulton was a trifle mollified. Besides, if her favorite child’s heart was set upon Spain, that dyed the matter with a different complexion; she could defer her subjection of the Californian, and, tired as she was, she was by no means averse to seeing Spain herself. Nevertheless, she rose with dignity and gathered her cape about her.

“You and your father will settle the matter to suit yourselves,” she said, with that access of politeness in which the down-trodden manifest their sense of injury. “But I have no hesitation in saying that I never before heard a gentlewoman”—she had the true middle-class horror of the word “lady”—“express a desire to travel third, and I think it will be a most unbecoming performance. Moreover, I doubt if anything can make us comfortable; we are reasonably sure to become infested with vermin and be made ill by the smell of garlic. I have had my say, however, and shall now go and lie down.”

As she moved up the path, her step measured, her spine protestant, her husband ran after and drew her arm through his. He nodded over his shoulder to his youngest daughter, and Lydia, deprecating further argument, went swiftly off in search of Catalina.

II

“Let us get out and race it,” suggested Catalina; but she spoke with the accent of indolent content, and hung over the door of the leisurely train, giving no heed beyond a polite nod to the nervous protests of Mrs. Moulton. That good lady, surrounded by air-cushions, which the various members of her attentive family distended at stated intervals, had propped herself in a corner, determined to let no expression of fatigue escape her, and enjoying herself in her own fashion. The material discomforts of travel certainly overbalanced the æsthetic delights, but, at least, she was seeing the Europe she had dreamed of so ardently in her youth. Jane sat in another corner reading a volume of Pater. It was impossible to turn her back on the scenery, for the seats ran from east to west and they were travelling due south, but she could ignore it, and that she did.

They were in a large, open car furnished with wooden seats and a door for each aisle. The carriage was not dirty, and all the windows were open; moreover, it harbored, so far, no natives beyond two nuns and a priest, who ate cherries continually and talked all at once with the rapidity of ignited fire-crackers and with no falling inflection. The Moultons had taken possession of the last compartment and sat with their backs to the wall, but Catalina, disdaining such poor apology for comfort, had the next to herself, and when not hanging over the door rambled back and forth. Mr. Moulton and Lydia alternately read Baedeker and leaned forward with exclamations of approval.

But although Catalina had responded amiably to Lydia’s expression of contempt for Spanish methods of transit, the ambling train suited her less energetic nature and enabled her to study the country that had mothered her own. She stared hard at the blue and tumbled masses of the Pyrenees with their lofty fields of snow glittering in a delicate mist, the same frozen solitude through which Hannibal marched two thousand years ago, longing, perhaps, for the hot, brown plain of Ampurdan below and the familiar murmur of the bright waters that rimmed it. The sun was hot, and all that quivering world of blue shimmered and sparkled and coquetted as if life and not death were its bridegroom. But the Mediterranean, like other seas, is a virago at heart and only dances and sways like a Spanish beauty when out where there is naught to oppose her; for centuries she has been snarling and clawing the rocky head-lands, her white fangs never failing to capture their daily morsel, and never content.

Catalina loved the sea and hated it. To-day she was in no mood to give it anything and turned her back upon it, her eyes travelling from the remote, disdainful beauty of the mountains down over the vineyards and villages, leaning far out to catch a last glimpse of that most characteristic object in a Spanish landscape—a huge and almost circular mass of rock rising abruptly from the plain, brown, barren, its apex set with a fortified castle, an old brown town clinging desperately to the inhospitable sides. The castle may be in ruins, but men and women still crawl lazily up and down the perpendicular streets, too idle or too poor to get away from the soil, with its dust of ancestral blood. The descendants of warriors slept and loafed and begged in the sun, thankful for a tortilla a day and dreading nothing this side of Judgment but the visit of the tax-gatherer. To escape the calls of the remorseless one, many who owned not even a little vineyard on the plain slept in the hollowed side of a hill and made the earth their pillow.

“Brutes!” said Catalina, meaning the government.

“Why don’t they come to America?” asked Lydia, wonderingly. “Look at that old woman out in the field. That is the most shocking thing you see in Europe—women in the fields everywhere.”

Catalina, indolent in some respects, waged eternal war with the one-sided. “Your factories are far worse,” she asserted. “They are really horrible, for the women stand on their feet all day with a ceaseless din tearing at their nerves and never a breath of decent air in their lungs. They are the most ghastly lot I ever saw in my life. These women are always in the fresh air, with the quiet of nature about them, and they rest when they like. I think we are the barbarians—we and the Spanish government.”

“Well, well, don’t argue,” said Mr. Moulton, soothingly. “It is too hot. We have our defects, but don’t forget our many redeeming virtues. And as for Spain, backward, tax-ridden, oppressed as she is, one sees nothing to compare with the horrors that Arthur Young saw in France just before 1789. Spain, no doubt, will have her own revolution in her own time; I am told the peasants are very virile and independent. My love, shall I blow up that bag behind your head?”

He examined the other bags, readjusted them, and there being nothing to claim the eye at the moment, read Baedeker aloud, to the intense but respectful annoyance of his eldest daughter and the barely concealed resentment of Catalina, who hung still farther over the creaking door.

The train walked into a little station of Tordera and stopped.

“Cinco minutos!” said the guard, raising his voice.

“Five!” said Catalina. “That means fifteen. Let us get out and exercise and buy something.”

“Pray be careful!” exclaimed Mrs. Moulton. “I know you will be left. Mr. Moulton, please—please don’t get out.”

Mr. Moulton patted her amiably and descended in the wake of Catalina and Lydia. They were surrounded at once by beggars, even the babies in arms extending their hands. There were few men among them, but the women, picturesque enough in their closely pinned kerchiefs of red or yellow, were more pertinacious than man ever dared to be. Lydia, fastidious and economical, retreated into the train and closed the door; but Catalina disbursed coppers and gave one dirty little Murillo a peseta. She had spoken almost as much Spanish in her life as English, and exchanged so many elaborate compliments with her retinue, in a manner so acceptable to their democratic taste, that they forgot to beg and pressed close at her heels as she strode up and down, her hands in her pockets, wondering what manner of fallen princess was this who travelled third class and knew how to treat a haughty peasant of Spain as her equal. She was buying an inflammable-looking novel with which to insult Jane, and a package of sweets for Lydia and herself, when she heard a shrill note of anguish:

“Mr. Moulton! Catalina!”

Mingling with it was the drone of the guard: “Viajeros al tren!”

The train was moving, the guard having been occupied at the cantina until the last moment. He was singing his song unconsciously on the step of an open door. Catalina saw the frantic whir of Mr. Moulton’s coat-tails as he flew by and leaped into the car. She flung two pesetas at the anxious vender, dropped her purchase into her pockets, and, running swiftly alongside the moving train, made the door easily.

“I could have caught the old thing if it had been half a mile off!” she exclaimed, indignantly, as three pairs of hands jerked her within, and Mrs. Moulton sniffed hysterically at her salts. “And if ever I do get left, just remember that I speak the language and am not afraid of anything.”

“Well,” said Mr. Moulton, tactfully, “just remember that we do not speak the language and have need of your services. Suppose we have our afternoon meal? The lunch at the frontier was not all that could be desired.”

He produced the hamper and neatly arrayed the top of two portmanteaus with jam and bread and cake. Catalina placed a generous share of these delicacies on a tin plate, and, omitting to explain to her astonished relatives, climbed over the seats and made offering to each of the other occupants of the car. It had half filled at the station, and besides the nuns and priests there were now several Catalan peasants in red caps and black velvet breeches, fine, independent men, prepared to ignore these eccentric Americans, ready to take offence at the slightest suggestion of superiority, but enchanted at the act of this unsmiling girl, who spoke their language and understood their customs. They refused, as a matter of course, politely, without servility, and in a moment she returned to her party.

“You must always do that,” she informed them, as she set her teeth hungrily into the bread, “and when they offer of theirs you must look pleased with the attention.”

Mrs. Moulton sighed, and when, a few moments later, a peasant vaulted over the seats and proudly offered of his store of black bread and garlic, she buried a frozen smile in her smelling-salts. Jane refused to notice him, but the other three declined with such professions of gratitude that he told his comrades the Americans were not altogether a contemptible race, and that the one who spoke their language looked like a devil with a white soul and was worthy to have been born in Spain. He took out his guitar in a moment and swept the keys with superb grace while the others sang, the nuns in high, quavering voices that wandered aimlessly through the rich tones of the men. After that they talked politics and became so excited that Mr. Moulton was relieved when they all fell out together at Mataro. He could then take notes and enjoy the groves of olives and oranges, the castles and watch-towers on the heights, eloquent and Iberian and Roman, Goth and Moor, the turquoise surface of the Mediterranean—never so blue as the Adriatic or the Caribbean—the bold, harsh sweep of the coast. Then, as even Catalina began to change her position frequently on the hard seats, and they were all so covered with dust that even the spinster visage of Jane looked like a study in grotesque, the horizon gave up the palaces and palms of Barcelona.

III

Twenty-three years before the opening of this desultory tale its heroine was born on the island of Santa Catalina, a fragment of Southern California. Her father had begun life as a professor of classics in a worthy Eastern college, but, his health breaking down, he betook himself and his small patrimony to the State which electrifies the nerves in its northern half and blunts them in its southern. Jonathan Shore wrote to his cousin, Lyman T. Moulton:

“I haven’t a nerve left with a point on it; have recovered some measure of health and lost what little ambition I ever possessed. I am going to open an inn for sportsmen on the island of Santa Catalina, so that I shall be reasonably sure of the society of gentlemen and make enough money to replenish my library now and then—my books are on the way. Here I remain for the rest of my natural life.”

But he crossed over to Los Angeles occasionally. At a soirée he met the daughter—and only child—of one of the largest landholders in Southern California, and danced with no one else that night. She married the scholarly innkeeper with the blessing of her father, who was anxious to pass his declining years in peace with a young wife. The bride, for coincident if not similar reasons, was glad to move to Catalina. She was the belle of her time, this Madelina Joyce, and her dark beauty came down to her from Indian ancestors. Her New England great-grandfather had come to California long before the discovery of gold, bought, for a fraction, two hundred thousand acres from the Mexican government, and married, despite the protests of his Spanish friends, an Indian girl of great beauty, both of face and character.

The Pueblo bride had lived but two years to receive the snubs of the haughty ladies of Santa Barbara, her ardent young husband had shot himself over her grave, and the boy was brought up by the padres of the mission. Fortunately, he came to man’s estate shortly before the United States occupation, and managed to save a portion of his patrimony from the most rapacious set of scoundrels that ever followed in the wake of a victorious army. This in turn descended to his son, who, in spite of Southern indolence and a hospitality as famous as his cellar, his liberal appreciation of all the good things of life, and a half-dozen lawsuits, still retained fifty thousand of the ancestral acres, and had given his word to his daughter that they should go to her unencumbered. This promise he kept, and when Catalina was ten years old he died, at good-will with all the world. His widow moved to San Francisco with her freedom and her liberal portion, and Mrs. Shore announced that she must give the ranch her personal attention. The ten years had been happy, for the husband and wife loved each other and were equally devoted to their beautiful, unsmiling baby. But there were deep wells of laughter in Mrs. Shore, and much energy. She wept for her father, but welcomed the change in her life, not only because she had reached the age when love of change is most insistent, but because she had begun to dread the hour of confession that life on an island, even with the man of one’s choice, was insufficient.

Mr. Shore himself was not averse to change so long as it did not take him out of California, although he refused to sell the little property on the island where he had spent so many happy years.

From the hour Mrs. Shore settled down in the splendid old adobe ranch-house she watched no more days lag through her fingers. Attended by Catalina she rode over some portion of the estate every day, and if a horse had strayed or a cow had calved she knew it before her indolent vaqueros. She personally attended, each year, to the sheep-shearing and the cattle-branding, the crops and the stock sales. Once a year she gave a great barbecue, to which all within a radius of a hundred miles were invited, and once a week she indulged herself in the gossip, the shops, and the dances of Santa Barbara.

In the vast solitude of the ranch Catalina grew up, carefully educated by her father, petted and indulged by her mother, hiding from the society that sought Mrs. Shore, but friendly with the large army of Mexican and Indian retainers. When she was persuaded by her mother to attend a party in Santa Barbara she rooted herself in a corner and glowered in her misery, snubbing every adventurous youth that approached her. She adored books, her out-door life, her parents, and asked for nothing further afield.

When she was eighteen her father died. She rode to the extreme confines of the ranch and mourned him, returning to her life at home with the stolidity of her Indian ancestors. Mrs. Shore grieved also, but by this time she was too busy a woman to consort with the past. Moreover, she was now at liberty to take Catalina to San Francisco and give her the proper tutors in languages and music. Incidentally, she made many new friends and enjoyed with all her vivid nature the life of a city which she had visited but twice before. She returned in the following winter and extended her fame as a hostess. Catalina found San Francisco society but little more interesting than that of the South, and enjoyed the reputation of being as rude as she was beautiful. Here, however, her Indian ancestress had her belated revenge. Her brief and tragic story cast a radiant halo about the indifferent Catalina, whose strain of aboriginal blood was extolled as the first cause in a piquant and original beauty; all her quaint eccentricities—which were merely the expression of a proud and reticent nature anxious to be let alone—were traced to the same artless source, and when one day in the park she sprang from her horse and shook the editor of a personal weekly until his teeth rattled in his head, her unique reputation was secure.

The greater part of the year was spent on the ranch. Mrs. Shore loved the world, but she was a woman of business above all things, and determined that the ranch should be a splendid inheritance for her child. Her time was closer than she knew. In all the vigor of her middle years, with the dark radiance of her beauty little dimmed, and an almost pagan love of mere existence, she was done to death by a bucking mustang, unseated for the first time since she had mounted a horse, and kicked beyond recognition.

Catalina resolutely put the horror of those days behind her, and for several months was as energetic a woman of business as her mother had been. She was mistress of a great tract of land, of herself, her time, her future. When her stoical grief for her mother subsided she found life interesting and stimulating. She rode about the ranch in the morning, or conferred with her lawyer, who drove out once a week; the afternoons she spent in the great court of the old house, with its stone fountain built by the ancestors who had learned their craft from the mission fathers, its palms and banana-trees, its old hollyhocks and roses. Here she read or dreamed vaguely of the future. What she wanted of life beyond this dreaming Southern land, where only an earthquake broke the monotony, was as vague of outline as her mountains under their blue mists, but its secrets were a constant and delightful well of perplexity. For two years she was contented, and at times, when galloping down to the sea in the early dawn, the old moon, bony and yellow, sinking to its grave in the darkest canyon of the mountain, and the red sun leaping from the sea, she was supremely happy.

Then, in a night, discontent settled upon her. She wanted change, variety; she wanted to see the world—Europe above all things; and when her Eastern relatives, with whom she corresponded, in obedience to a last request of her father, again pressed her to visit them, and mentioned that they were contemplating a trip abroad, she started on three hours’ notice, leaving the ranch in charge of a trusted overseer and the executors of her mother’s will.

She found her relatives living in a suburb of New York, their social position very different from that her mother had given her in California. Nothing saved them from the narrow routine of the suburban middle class but the intellectual proclivities of Mr. Moulton, who was reader for a publishing house and the literary adviser of the pseudo-intellectual. Through the constant association of his name with moral and non-sensational fiction, his well-balanced attitude of piety tinctured by humor, the pleasant style with which he indited irreproachable and elevated platitudes, his stern and invariable denunciation of the unorthodox in religion, in ideas, and in style, and his genially didactic habit of telling his readers what they wished to hear, he had achieved the rank of a great critic. As he really was an estimable man and virtuous husband, of agreeable manners, sufficiently hospitable, and extremely careful in choosing his friends, his position in the literary world was quite enviable. The great and the safe took tea on his lawn, and if the great and unsafe laughed at both the tea and the critic that was the final seal of their unregeneracy.

When Catalina arrived, after lingering for a fortnight in Boston with a friend she had made on the train, she liked him at once, unjustly despised Mrs. Moulton, who was the best of wives and copied her husband’s manuscripts, hated Jane, and recognized in Lydia a human being in whom one could find a reasonable amount of companionship, in spite of the magnetism of the mirror—or even the polished surface of a panel—for her complacent eyes. Lydia was innocently vain, and, being the beauty of the family, believed herself to be very beautiful indeed. She always made a smart appearance, and was frankly desirous of admiration. Like many family beauties, she had a strong will and was reasonably clever. When the first opportunity to go to Europe arrived she had reached what she called a critical point in her life. She confided to Catalina that she was becoming morbidly tired of mere existence and hated the sight of every literary man she knew, particularly the young ones.

“Of course, they are more or less the respectable hangers-on that give us the benefit of their society,” she said, gloomily. “Those that scurry about writing little stories for the magazines and weekly papers—it seems to me a real man might find something better to do. We know all the big ones, but they are too busy to come out here often, and father sees them at the Century and Authors’ clubs, anyhow. We hardly know a man who isn’t a publisher, an editor, or a writer of something or other—perhaps an occasional artist. For my part, I’d give my immortal soul to be one of those lucky girls that go to Mrs. Astor’s parties; that’s my idea of life. If a millionaire would only fall in love with me—or any old romance, for that matter!”

“Have you never been in love?” asked Catalina, afraid of the sound of her own voice but deeply interested.

“Not the least little bit, more is the pity. I wouldn’t mind even being heart-broken for a while.”

It was this frankness that endeared her to Catalina. “Jane is third rate, and tries to conceal the fact from herself and others by an affectation of such of the literary galaxy as make the least appeal to the popular taste, and cousin Lyman is no critic,” she informed herself three days after her arrival. “Cousin Miranda is just one of those American women who are invalids for no reason but because they want to be, and I suppose even Lydia would get on my nerves in time. Thank Heaven, when they do I can leave at a moment’s notice.”

After four months of the friction of travel, Catalina had half hoped her relatives would reject her startling proposal and abandon her to a future full of dangers and freedom.

IV

She brushed her hair viciously in the solitude of her bedroom in Barcelona; fortunately, the composition of the party always gave her a room to herself.

“To-morrow morning I’ll be up and out before they are awake,” she announced to her sulky image. “This evening I suppose I must walk with them on the Rambla. Of course, if I had come alone I should have had to find a chaperon for such occasions, but it would be some quaint old duenna I could hire. I’ve never wanted my liberty as I do here in Spain, and Cousin Lyman will barely let me wash my own face. I never was so taken care of in my life—”

She ground her teeth, but nodded as Mr. Moulton put his head in at the door and asked her if she were sure she was comfortable, if her room was quite clean and her keys in proper order. Then he adjured her not to drink the water until he had ascertained its reputation, and to be careful not to lean over the railing of the balcony, as it might be insecure; the Spanish were a shiftless people, so far as his observation of them went.

Catalina flung her hair-brush at the door as he pattered down the hall to examine the welfare of his daughters.

“I’ve a mind to go up and dance on the roof,” she cried, furiously. “One would think I was four years old. Papa was just like that when we travelled, and if all American men are the same I’ll marry an Englishman.”

After dinner Mr. Moulton, having seen his wife safely into bed and conscientiously determined to observe every respectable phase of foreign life, drew Lydia’s arm within his, and, bidding Catalina take Jane’s and follow close behind him, went out upon the Rambla. Upon these occasions he always took his youngest carefully under his wing. A wag had once said of her, while commenting upon the infinite respectability of the Lyman T. Moultons, that on a moonlight night, in a boat on a lake, Lydia might develop possibilities; and it may have been some dim appreciation of these possibilities that prompted Mr. Moulton to favor the beauty of the family with more than her share of attention. But Lydia had a coquettish pair of eyes, and under her father’s formidable wing had indulged in more than one innocent flirtation. Catalina raged that she was to take her first night’s pleasure in Spain in the companionship of Jane, and ignored her protector’s mandate. Jane, whose sense of duty increased in proportion to her dislikes, took a firm hold of the Californian’s rigid and vertical arm, and marched close upon her father’s heels.

They promenaded with all Barcelona, in the very middle of the Rambla, that splendid avenue of many names above the vaulted bed of the river. For nearly a mile on either side the hotels and cafés and many of the shops and side streets were brilliantly alight. Under the double row of plane-trees were kiosks for the sale of newspapers, post-cards of the bull-fight, fans, and curios; and passing and repassing were thousands of people. All who were not forced to work this soft southern night strolled there indolently, to take the air, to see, now and again to be seen. Doubtless, there were other promenades for the poor, but here all appeared to have come from the houses of the aristocracy or wealthy middle class. Many were the duennas, elderly, stout, or shrunken, always in black, with a bit of lace about the head, immobile and watchful. Perhaps they towed one maiden, but more frequently a party.

The girls and young matrons were light and gay of attire; occasionally their millinery was Parisian, but more often they wore the mantilla or rebosa. Their eyes were bright, demure, inviting, rarely indifferent; and making up the other half of the throng were officers, students, men of the world, murmuring compliments as they passed or talking volubly of politics and war. Two young aristocrats behind Catalina were laughing over the recent visit of the young king, when, simply by the magic of his boyish personality, eager to please, he had transformed in a moment the most hostile and anarchistic city in his kingdom, determined to show its insolent contempt, into a mob of cheering, hysterical madmen. The socialists and anarchists might be sailing their barks on the hidden river beneath, they were forgotten, the mayor hardly dared to show his face, and the women kissed their fingers to the pictures of the gallant little king hanging on every kiosk; the men lifted their hats.

It was the most brilliant and animated picture of out-door life that Catalina had seen in Europe, and the general air of good breeding, of mingled vivacity and perfect dignity, the picturesque beauty of many of the women, the constant ripple of talk and laughter, the flare of light and the dim shades of the old trees, appealed powerfully to the girl from the most picturesque portion of the United States, and in whom scenes of mere fashion and frivolity aroused a resentment as passionate as if fed by envy and privation. She had stood one morning not a fortnight since on a corner of the Rue de Rivoli and watched carriage after carriage, automobile after automobile roll round the corner of the Place de la Concord, each framing women in the extravagant uniform of fashion—American women, all come from across the sea for one purpose only, the purpose for which they lived their useless, idle lives—more clothes. For this they spent two wretched weeks on the ocean every year—the ship’s doctor had told Catalina that the pampered American was the most unheroic sailor on the Atlantic—and they looked unnormal, exotic, mere shining butterflies whose necks would be twisted with one turn of a strong wrist in the first week of a revolution; a revolution of which, unindividual as they were, they would be a precipitating cause. But here there was no exotic class, none but legitimate causes of separation from the masses; it was the charming faces one noted, the lively expression of pleasure in mere living; the garments might be Parisian, but, being less than the woman, and worn without consciousness, they barely arrested the eye, and were no part of the picture, as was the mantilla or the rebosa.

Catalina for once hated no one in the world, and even became oblivious of the grip on her arm. She looked about her with the wide, curious eyes of youth. Few gave her more than a passing glance, for her stiff hat threw an ugly shadow on her face and every line of her figure was hidden under her loose coat. But she noted that Lydia, who in the evening wore a small hat perched coquettishly on her fluffy hair, was receiving audible admiration. Suddenly she glanced out of the corner of her eye at Jane, but that severe virgin was staring moodily at the ground; her head ached and she longed for bed. Mr. Moulton, doing his best to be interested and stifle his yawns, was glancing in every direction but his immediate right, and consequently no one but his pretty daughter, and finally Catalina, noticed the handsome young Spaniard who had established communication with the blue eyes of the north. Finally the youth whispered something in which only the word adorado was intelligible to Lydia, who clung to her father’s arm with a charming scowl.

“Don’t be frightened,” whispered Catalina.

“They don’t mean anything—not like Frenchmen.”

Not only was the crowd so great that many a flirtation passed unnoticed, but heretofore Catalina had not observed that the cavalier was companioned. When he whispered to Lydia, however, she saw a man beside him frown and take his arm as if to draw him away, but when she reassured the coquette, this man turned suddenly, his brows still knit but relaxing with a flash of amusement. Then Catalina took note of him and saw that he was not a Spaniard, although nearly as dark as Lydia’s conquest. He was an Englishman, she made sure by his expression, so subtly different from that of the American. He might have been an officer, from his carriage, and he was extremely thin and walked slowly, rather than sauntered, as if the effort were distasteful or painful. His thin, well-bred face looked as if it recently might have been emaciated, but its pervading expression was humorous indifference, and his eyes had almost danced as they met hers. He did not look at her a second time, evidently seeing no profit in the idle flirtations that delighted his neighbors, and Catalina, a trifle piqued, watched him covertly, and decided that he was a nobleman, had been in the Boer War, was doubtless covered with scars and medals.

V

He did not haunt her dreams, however, and she had quite forgotten him as she watched the sunrise next morning from the long ridge of the Montjuich. Her cabman was refreshing himself elsewhere and she had given herself up to one of the keenest delights known to the imaginative and ungregarious mind, the solitary contemplation of nature. She watched the great, dusky plains and the jagged whiteness of Montseny’s lofty crest turn yellow. Spain is one of those rare, dry countries where the very air changes color. The whole valley seemed to fill slowly with a golden mist, the snow on the great peak and on the Pyrenees beyond glittered like the fabled sands, and even the villas clinging to the steep mountain-side, the palaces in their groves of palm-trees and citron, orange, and pomegranate, all seemed to move and sway as in the depths of shimmering tides. Catalina had the gift to see color in atmosphere as apart from the radiance that falls on sky and mountain, a gift which is said to belong only to people so highly civilized as to be on the point of degeneration. Catalina, with her robust youth and brain, was well on the hither side of degeneration, but in her lonely life and dislike of humankind she had cultivated her natural appreciation of beauty until it had not only developed her perceptions to acuteness but empowered them, when enchanted, to rise high above the ego.

She stood with her head thrown back, her mouth half open as if to quaff deeply of that golden draught, fancying that just beyond her vision lay all cosmos waiting to reveal itself and the mystery of the eternal. When she heard herself accosted she was bewildered for a moment, not realizing that she was actually in the world of the living.

“You will ruin your eyes, Miss Shore,” a calm but genial voice had said. “The scene is worth it, but—”

“How dare you speak to me!” cried Catalina, furiously. She advanced swiftly, willing to strike him, not in the least mollified to recognize the Englishman upon whom she had bestowed her infrequent approval the night before.

His eye lit with interest and a pardonable surprise. But he continued, imperturbably: “Of course, I should not have been so rude as to speak to you if I hadn’t happened to know Mr. Moulton rather well. I had a talk with him last night in the hotel and he was good enough to tell me your name.”

“How on earth did you ever know Cousin Lyman?” She forgot her anger. “You are an Englishman, and I am sure Cousin Lyman—” She stopped awkwardly, too loyal to continue, but her eyes were large with curiosity. Where could Lyman T. Moulton have known this Englishman with his unmistakable air of that small class for whose common sins society has no punishment? “He usually knows only literary people,” she continued, lamely.

“And you are sure I am not!” His laugh was abrupt, but as good-natured as his voice. “You are quite right. I can’t even write a decent letter. But literary men often belong to good clubs, you know, and one of the most distinguished of our authors happened to bring Mr. Moulton to one of mine. He was over some years ago.”

“Oh, I remember.” She also recalled the curious boyish pleasure which illumined Mr. Moulton’s face whenever he alluded to this visit to England. It had been his one vacation from his family in thirty years.

“What is your name?” demanded Catalina, with an abruptness not unlike his own, but unmodified by his careless good-humor.

“Over.” Then, as she still looked expectant, “Captain James Brassy Over, if it interests you.”

“Oh!” She was childishly disappointed that he was not a lord, never having consciously seen one, then was gratified at her perspicacity of the night before.

“How have I disappointed you?”

“Disappointed me?” Her eyes flashed again. “All men are disappointing and are generally idiots, but I could not be disappointed in a person to whom I had never given a thought.”

“Oh!” he said, blankly. He was not offended, but was uncertain whether she were affected or merely a badly brought up child. Belonging to that order of men who have something better to do than to understand women, he decided to let her remark pass and await developments.

“I’m rather keen on Mr. Moulton,” he announced, “and have half a mind to join your party. I was going to cut across to Madrid, but he says you have made out rather a jolly trip down the coast and then in to Granada.”

“But we are travelling third class,” she stammered, with the first prompting of snobbery she had ever known. “We—we thought it would be such an experience.”

“So Mr. Moulton told me. I always travel third.”

“You? Why?”

“Poverty,” he said, cheerfully.

Catalina was furious with herself, the more so as she had descended to the level of her cousins, whom she secretly despised as snobs. She did not know how to extricate herself from the position she had assumed, and answered, lamely:

“Poverty? You don’t look poor.”

“Only my debts keep me from being a pauper.”

“And you don’t mind travelling third?”

“Mind? It’s comfortable enough; as comfortable as sleeping on the ground.”

Catalina’s face illumined. For the first time it occurred to him that she might be pretty. She forgot the awkward subject, and asked, eagerly:

“Were you in the Boer War?”

“Yes.”

“All through it?”

“Pretty well.”

“Do tell me about it. I never before met any one who had been in the Boer War, and it interested me tremendously.”

“There’s nothing to tell but what you must have read in the papers.”

“I suppose that is an affectation of modesty.”

“Not at all. Nothing is so commonplace as war. There is nothing in it to make conversation about.”

“But you lost such a dreadful number of officers!”

“We had plenty to spare—could have got along better with less.”

His cheerfulness was certainly unaffected. The two pairs of dark eyes watched each other narrowly, his keen and amused, hers with their stolid surface and slumbering fires.

“But you were wounded!” she said, triumphantly.

“Never was hit in my life.”

“But you have been ill!”

“Oh, ill, fast enough—rheumatism.”

Her eyes softened. “Ah, sleeping on the damp ground!”

“No. Drink.”

For a moment the sullen fires in Catalina boiled high, then her eyes caught the sparkle in his and she burst into a ringing peal of laughter. She laughed rarely, and when she did her whole being vibrated to the buoyancy of youth.

“Well,” she said, gayly, “I hope you have reformed. The Moultons are temperance—rabid—and I had rheumatism once from camping out. I had to set my teeth for a week. Then I went to a sulphur spring and cured it. But I am hungry. Isn’t there a restaurant here, somewhere?”

“I was about to suggest a visit to the Café Miramar. It is only a step from here.”

A few minutes later they sat at a little table on the terrace, and while Captain Over ordered the coffee and rolls Catalina forgot him and stared out over the vast blue sparkle of the Mediterranean. Above, the air had drifted from gold to pink—a soft, vague pink, stealing away before the mounting sun. She had pushed back her hat and coat, and the soft collar of her blouse showed a youthful column upon which her head was proudly set. She wore no hair on her fine, open brow, but the knot at the base of the neck was rich in color. Her complexion, without red to break its magnolia tint, was flawless even in that searching light. Her beautiful eyes were vacant for the moment, and her nose, while delicate, was unclassical, her cheek-bones high; but it was her mouth that arrested Over’s gaze as the most singular feature he had ever seen. Childishly red, it was deftly cut, and resembled—what was it? A bow? Certainly not a Cupid’s bow, for that was full and pouting. Then he recalled the Indian bows in the armory at home. That was it—the bow of an Indian bent sharply in the middle, so sharply that it was really two half-bows the mouth resembled, and absolutely perfect in its drawing, in the tapering sweep of its corners. A perfect mouth is a feature one may read of for a lifetime and never see, however many mouths there be that charm and invite. Pretty mouths are abundant enough, and mouths that indicate lofty or delightful characteristics, but rarely is the mouth seen for which nature has done all that she so generously does for eyes and profile. But for Catalina she had cut a mouth so exquisite that its first effect was of something uncanny, as of an unknown race, and it further held the attention as indicating absolutely nothing of the character behind.

Catalina dazedly removed her eyes from the sea and met Over’s.

“Stop staring at me,” she said, with a frown.

He was about to retort that she had been made to be stared at, but it occurred to him in time that he understood her too little to invite her into the airy region of compliment. He had known girls to resent them before, and they were not in his line anyway. He merely replied: “Here comes the coffee. I promise you to give it my undivided attention.”

They sat silent for a few moments, keenly appreciating their little repast. Coffee always went to Catalina’s head, and when she had finished she felt happy and full of good-fellowship.

“I like you immensely, and hope you’ll come with us,” she announced. “I’m rather sorry you are not a lord, though. I’ve never seen one.”

“Well, I have a cousin who is one, and if you like to come to England I’ll show him to you. He’s rather an ass, though, and you’ll probably guy him.”

“You are not very respectful to the head of your house.”

“Oh, he was my fag at school—he’s two years younger than I am.”

“Is he in the House of Peers?”

“Good Lord, no! That is, he has his seat, of course, but I doubt if he’d recognize Westminster in a photograph. Gayety girls are his lay. We married him young, though, and assured the succession.”

“Is he a typical lord?”

“What’s that? We have all sorts, like any other class. I might as well ask you if you were a typical American.”

“Well, I’m not!” cried Catalina, with lightning in her eyes. “If nature had made me a type I’d have made myself over. It makes me hate nearly everybody, but, at least, I love to be alone, and I can always get that when I want it. I’ve got a big ranch—fifty thousand acres—and after my mother died, two years ago I lived on it alone, never speaking to a soul but my men of business and the servants. That’s my idea of bliss, and the moment I strike the American shore I’m going back.”

He looked at her with increasing interest—a girl of silences who loved nature and hated man. But he merely said, with his quick smile: “You are a very grand young person indeed. Somerton—my cousin—has only thirty thousand acres. Of course, he’s beastly poor—has so much to keep up. I suppose a ranch of that size is pure luxury, and blossoms like the rose.”

“Much you know about it. I often have all I can do to make both ends meet. Droughts kill off my cattle and sheep and dry up everything that grows. My Mexicans and Indians are an idle, worthless lot, but sentiment prevents me from turning them off—their grandparents worked on the ranch. It makes me independent, of course, but I really am what is called land poor. I’m thinking of dividing a part of it into farms and selling them, and also of selling some property I have on Santa Catalina, which has become fashionable. Then I should be quite rich. Mother could get work out of anybody, but I am not nearly so energetic, and they know it. But I am so happy when I am there, and need so little money for myself that I haven’t thought about it heretofore. Being over here has taught me the value of money, and I want to come back to Europe before long. Then I’ll come alone and stay several years. There is so much to learn, and I find I know next to nothing. Well, let us go. As long as I am with the Moultons I suppose I must consider them, and they probably think I have been kidnapped. Who was that youth you were walking with last night?”

“The Marquis Zuñiga. I met him at the club and we strolled out together. I introduced him to Mr. Moulton and he will call this afternoon—is quite bowled over by your golden-haired cousin. I suppose we can drive back together? It would look rather absurd, wouldn’t it, going down in a procession of two?”

VI

They were to have remained in Barcelona a week, but Mr. Moulton, alarmed at the impassioned devotion of Zuñiga to Lydia, decided to leave on the morning of the fourth day.

“That will be just six hours before Zuñiga is up, so you need not worry about giving him the slip,” said Captain Over, who thought that Lydia would be well out of the young Spaniard’s way. “If Miss Shore will join me in the morning we can do the shopping for the family. She speaks Spanish, and I have done this sort of thing before.”

Mr. Moulton, who looked upon Over as his personal conquest, and, despite his good looks, never thought of him in the light of a marrying man, gave his message to Catalina, and pattered down the hall to break the news to his family. He was nervous but determined. Mrs. Moulton had seen all of Barcelona that was necessary for retrospect and conversation. Jane immediately began to pack her portmanteau. Lydia shot him a glance of reproach, flushed, and turned away.

“I won’t have any decadent Spaniards philandering round my daughters,” said Mr. Moulton, firmly. “If you were going to marry a Spaniard I had rather it were a peasant, for they, at least, are the hope of the country. This young Zuñiga hasn’t an idea in his head beyond flirting and horse-racing. He has no education and no principles.”

“I’ve talked with him more than you have,” said Lydia, with spirit, “and I think him lovely!”

“Lovely? What a term to apply to any man, let alone a dissipated Spaniard! Have I not begged you, my love, to choose your adjectives—one of the first principles of style?”

“I don’t write,” retorted Lydia, who was in a very naughty mood. “I have no use for style.”

“I should never be surprised to see your name in our best magazines,” said Mr. Moulton, with his infinite tact. “Make this young man the hero of a story if you like. A clever Englishwoman I met yesterday, and who has lived in Spain for many years, told me that the Spanish youth is the brightest in the world, but that when he reaches the age of fourteen his brain closes up like the shell of an oyster and never opens again; the reason is that at that age he takes to immoderate smoking and various other forms of dissipation, the brain from that time on receiving neither nourishment nor encouragement. I intend to write an essay on the subject. It is most interesting. And I thought out a splendid phrase this afternoon. I’ll write it down this moment before I forget it.” He whipped out his note-book. “‘The only hope for Spain lies in the abolishment of bull-fights, beggars, and churches.’ First of all there must be a revolution in which the most worthless aristocracy in Europe will disappear forever. I would not have them beheaded, but driven out. Now, pack before you go to bed, my love, for we must be up bright and early—we have not seen the cathedral. Shall I help you?”

Jane had finished. Lydia sulkily declined his assistance. He kissed them both, and went off to his nightly jottings and to pack the conjugal portmanteau.

Lydia continued to brush out her golden locks and to frown at her mirror. She longed for sympathy and a confidant, but knew that Jane would agree with her father, and recalled that Catalina had barely taken note of Zuñiga’s existence.

“But if he has any sand,” she informed herself, “he will follow me up. And I’ll marry whom I please—so there!”

The next morning, having seen the rest of the party off to the cathedral, Catalina and Captain Over started down the Rambla Centro in high good-humor; they shared the exhilaration of moving on, and enjoyed the novelty of the new housekeeping. They packed a hamper with cold ham and roast chicken, cake, and two loaves of bread. Then Catalina bought recklessly in a confectioner’s and Captain Over visited a coffee-shop. When they had filled the front seat of their cab, Catalina, after a half-hour of sharp bargaining, bought a white lace mantilla and a fine old fan.

“These are two of the things I came to Spain for,” she announced to the bewildered Englishman, who had shopped with women before, but never with a woman who was definite, concentrated, driving hard in a straight line. As they went out with the precious bundle he ventured his first remark.

“I had an idea you were indifferent to dress.”

“I am and I am not. I had rather be comfortable most of the time, and I hate being stared at, but when I dress I dress. I may never wear this mantilla, but it is a thing of beauty to possess and look at.”

“I hope you will wear it, and here in Spain. Are you part Spanish, by-the-way?”

“No, Indian.”

“Indian?” He looked at her with renewed interest. “Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t. It’s a good excuse for a whole lot of things.”

“Ah, I see. Well, it certainly makes you different from other people. You like that and you may believe it.”

Lydia was profoundly thankful to leave Barcelona while her marquis still slumbered; she was too young and curious not to be glad to travel on any terms, but to say farewell in a third-class carriage to a member of an ancient aristocracy was quite another matter. She accounted for Captain Over’s willingness to travel humbly by the supposition that he was in love with Catalina, and did not believe for a moment that it was his habit.

But Captain Over was not in love with Catalina. He was still half an invalid, and constitutionally indolent, as are most men who are immediately attractive to women. She interested and amused him, was a good comrade when in a good-humor, and as full of pluck and resource as a boy. He liked all the family, including Jane, who was charmed with him, and enjoyed Mr. Moulton’s many good stories. It was a pleasant party and he was glad to join it, but if he had been summoned hastily back to England, or been sure that when the journey was over he should never see these agreeable companions again, he would have accepted the decree with the philosophy of one who had met many delightful people in many country-houses and sat by many delightful women at many London dinners, whose very names he might forget before he saw them again. It was a part of his charm that he appeared to live so wholly in the present, without retrospect or anticipation, and Catalina concluded it was the result of being a soldier, whose time was not his own, and who was ready and willing to accept the end of all things at any moment.

The cool, open car in which they moved out of Barcelona had an aisle down the middle and was new and highly varnished. Even Jane condescended to remark that in hot weather in a dusty country such accommodations were preferable to upholstered seats which, doubtless, were not brushed once a month. Then she retired to her Pater, and the rest of the party hung out of the windows and gazed at the tremendous ridge of Montserrat cutting the blue sky like a thousand twisted fingers petrified in their death-throes. It is the most jagged mass of rock in Europe; Nature would seem to have spat it out through gnashing teeth; and surely no spot more terrifying even to the gods could have been selected for the safe-keeping of the holy grail.

Then once more the train ambled through vineyards and silver olive groves, past old brown castles on their rocky heights, glimpses of Roman roads and ruins, the innumerable tunnels making the brown plains more dazzling, the sea in glimpses like a chain of peacock’s feathers.

To-day for the greater part of the trip their companions were a large party of washing-women, brawny, with shining, pleasant faces. They wore blue cotton frocks and white handkerchiefs pinned about their slippery heads. On the capacious lap of each was a basket of white clothes. They gossiped volubly and paid no attention to the Americans, who, indeed, in a short time, were so dusty that the varnish of civilization was obliterated.

They were a gay party. As the day’s trip was to be short, Mrs. Moulton concluded not to feel tired, and while they were in the tunnels Captain Over made her a cup of tea under the seat, regardless of the Guardia Civile who were honoring the carriage with their presence. These personages looked very sturdy and self-confident in their smart uniforms, and quite capable of handling the always possible bandit. Catalina audibly invoked him. She was possessed by that exhilaration which a woman feels when in the companionship of a new and interesting man with whom she is not in love. The great passion induces an illogical depression of spirits, melancholy forebodings, and extremes of sentimentalism, which are the death of high spirits and humor. Catalina had some inkling of this, having experienced one or two brief and silent attacks of misplaced affection, and rejoiced in the spontaneous and mutual friendship. Outwardly she looked as solemn as usual, but, perhaps, even hidden sunshine may warm, for on no day since they left Lyons had the party been so independent of material ills. Even Lydia came forth from the sulky aloofness of the morning, and Jane laid Pater to rest, when, after the excellent luncheon, Catalina produced a large box of bonbons.

By this time there was no one in the car but the Guardia Civile and a young peasant, a brawny, handsome Catalan, who might have been the village blacksmith and a possible leader in the anarchy of his province. He had the haughty, independent manner of his class, and, although his eye was fiery and reckless, the lower part of his face symbolized power and self-control.

Lydia, having carefully washed the dust from her face, in a spirit of mischief and breathless in her first open act of mutiny, left her seat abruptly and offered the box of sweets first to the military escort, who arose and declined with a profound bow, then to the young peasant. She had stood before the guards with downcast eyes, but when the peasant turned to her she deliberately lifted her long brown eyelashes, and the blue shallows sparkling with coquetry met a wild and eager flash never encountered before. A blue silk handkerchief was knotted loosely about her dishevelled golden head, she wore a blue soft cotton blouse, and her cheeks were pink. Dainty and sweet and gracious, what wonder that she dazzled the rustic accustomed to maidens as swarthy as himself?

“Madre de Dios!” he muttered.

“A dulce, señor?” said Lydia, with the charming hesitation of the imperfect linguist.

Then the peasant rose, and with the grace and courtesy of a grandee possessed himself of a bonbon. But he did not know, perhaps, that it was intended to go the road of black bread and garlic, for he fumbled in the pocket of his blouse, brought forth an envelope, rolled up the sweetmeat, and tenderly secreted it. Lydia gave him a radiant smile, shook her head, and still held out the box.

“Eat one,” she said; and as the man only stared at her with deepening color, she put one of the bonbons into her own mouth and motioned to him to follow suit. This time he obeyed her, and for the moment they had the appearance, and perhaps the sensation, of breaking bread together.

“Dios de mi alma!” muttered the man, and then Lydia bowed to him gravely and turned slowly, reluctantly, and rejoined her panting family. Mrs. Moulton’s face was scarlet; she was sitting upright; the air-cushions were in a heap on the floor. Mr. Moulton’s bland visage expressed solemn indignation, an expression which he had the ability to infuse into the review of a book prudence warned him to condemn.

“Lydia Moulton!” exclaimed her mother.

“I am grieved and ashamed,” said her father.

“Why?” asked Lydia, flippantly. “It is the custom in Spain to share with your travelling companions, and last night you said you had rather I married a Spanish peasant than a Spanish gentleman.”

“I am ashamed of you!” repeated Mr. Moulton, with dignity. “Are you looking for a husband, may I ask? If so, we will go direct to Gibraltar and take the first steamer for America.”

Lydia colored, but she was still in a naughty mood, and, encouraged by a sympathetic flash from Catalina, she retorted:

“No, I don’t want to marry, but I do want to be able to look at a man unchaperoned by the entire family. I haven’t had the liberty of a convent girl since I arrived in Europe. I feel like running off with the first man that finds a chance to propose to me.”

Mrs. Moulton, whose complexion during this outburst had faded to its normal gray tones, the little lines of cultivated worries and invalidism quivering on the surface, turned her pale gaze upon Catalina. She stared mutely, but volumes rolled into the serene, contemptuous orbs two seats away.

Mr. Moulton, in his way, was a rapid thinker. “My dear,” he said, gently, to the revolutionist, “if we have surrounded you it has not been from distrust, but because you are far too pretty to be alone among foreigners for a moment. At home, as you know, you often receive your young friends alone. I am sure that when you think the matter over you will regret your lapse from dignity, particularly as you have no doubt disturbed that poor young man’s peace of mind.”

Lydia seldom rebelled, but she had learned that when her father became diplomatic she might as well smite upon stone; so she refrained from further sarcasm, and, retreating to a seat behind the others, stared sullenly out of the window. She was not unashamed of herself, but longed, nevertheless, to meet again the fiery gaze of the Catalan—“the anarchist,” she called him; it sounded far better than peasant. Zuñiga dwindled out of her memory as the poor, artificial thing he no doubt was. At last she had seen a blaze of admiration in the eyes of a real man. She was not wise enough to know that it was nothing in her meagre little personality that had roused the lightnings in a manly bosom, merely a type of prettiness made unconventional by the setting and the man. But the impression was made, and had she dared she would have sent an occasional demure glance towards the young peasant behind her; as it was she adjusted her charming profile for his delectation.

They entered the long tunnel which the train traverses before skirting the bluffs of Tarragona. Spain does not light its railway carriages before dark. Lydia had thrown her arm along the seat. Suddenly she became aware that some one, as lithe and noiseless as a cat, had entered the seat behind her. She was smitten with sudden terror, and held her breath. A second later a pair of young and ardent lips passed as lightly as a passing flame along her rigid hand.

“Dueño adorado!” The voice was almost at her ear. Then she knew that the seat was empty again. Her first impulse had been to cry out; she was terrified and furious. But she had a quick vision of a mêlée of knives and pistols, the Guardia Civile and peasant, reinforcements from the next car, and the death of all her party. It was the imaginative feat of her life, and as the train ran out of the tunnel she congratulated herself warmly and put on her hat as indifferently as Jane, who had never known the kiss of man. She swept past her admirer with her head high and her lids—with their curling lashes—low.

VII

“Ah!” exclaimed Captain Over, “this is Spain! Who is going to sit with me in front?”

Catalina made no reply, but she ran swiftly to the big, canvas-covered diligence, climbed over the high wheel before Over could follow to assist her, and seated herself beside the driver with the most ingratiating manner that any of her party had seen her assume. Over placed himself beside her, the others took possession of the rear, the driver cracked his whip, and the six mules, jingling with half a hundred bells, leaped down the dusty road towards the steep and rocky heights where Tarragona has defied the nations of the earth. Then it was that Over laughed softly, and the innocent Moultons learned what depths of iniquity may lie at the base of a ranch-girl’s blandishments. As they reached the foot of the bluff the delighted youth who was answerable to Heaven for his precious freight abandoned the reins. Catalina gathered them in one hand, half rose from her seat, and with a great flourish cracked the long whip, not once, but thrice, delivering herself of sharp, peremptory cries in Spanish. The mules needed no further encouragement. They tore up the steep and winding road, whisked round curves, strained every muscle to show what a Spanish mule could do. They even shook their heads and tossed them in the air that their bells might jingle the louder. Mrs. Moulton and Jane screamed, clinging to each other, the portmanteaus bounced to the floor, and Mr. Moulton would have grasped Catalina’s arm but Over intercepted and reassured him. And, indeed, there were few better whips than Catalina in a state notorious for a century of reckless and brilliant driving. She drove like a cowboy, not like an Englishwoman, Over commented, but he felt the exhilaration of it, even when the unwieldy diligence bounded from side to side in the narrow road and the dust enveloped them. In a moment he shifted his eyes to her face. Her white teeth were gleaming through the half-open bow of her mouth, tense but smiling, and her splendid eyes were flashing, not only with the pleasure of the born horsewoman, but with a wicked delight in the consternation behind her. She looked, despite the mules and the dusty old diligence, like a goddess in a chariot of victory, and Over, who rarely imagined, half expected to see fire whirling in the clouds of dust about the wheels.

As they reached the top of the bluff the driver indicated the way, and they flew down the Rambla San Carlos, past the astounded soldiers lounging in front of the barracks, and stopped with a grand flourish in front of the hotel.

Catalina turned to Over, her lips still parted, her eyes glittering.

“That is the first time I have been really happy since I left home,” she announced, ignoring her precipitately descending relatives. “I feel young again, and I’ve felt as old as the hills ever since I’ve been in Europe. I’ll like you forever because you approve of me, and I haven’t seen that expression on anybody’s face for months.”

“Oh, I approve of you!” said the Englishman, laughing.

They descended, and she challenged him to race her to the parapet that they might limber themselves. He accepted, and, in spite of her undepleted youth, he managed to beat by means of a superior length of limb. The victory filled him with a quite unreasoning sense of exultation, and as they hung over the parapet and looked out upon the liquid turquoise of the sea, sparkling under a cloudless sky, its little white sail-boats dancing along with the pure joy of motion, he felt younger and happier than he had since his cricket days.

“I think we had better not go to the hotel for a time,” he suggested. “I am afraid that Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are in a bit of a wax. Perhaps after they have rested and freshened up they will forgive you, and meanwhile we can explore.”

So they wandered off to the old town until they stood at the foot of a flight of ancient stone steps, wider than three streets, that led up to the plaza before the cathedral. Crouching in the shallow corners of the stair were black-robed old crones who looked as if they might have begged of Cæsar. Passing up and down, or in and out of the narrow streets, to right and left were young women of languid and insolent carriage, in bright cotton frocks and yellow kerchiefs about their heads, young men in small clothes and wide hats, loafing along as if all time were in their little day, and troops and swarms of children. These attached themselves to the strangers, encouraged by the caressing Spanish words of the girl, followed them through the cathedral, and out into a side street, chattering like magpies.

“You look like a comet with a long tail,” said Over. “I’ll scatter them with a few coppers.” He paused as she turned her head over her shoulder and regarded him with a wondering reproach. For the moment her large brown eyes looked bovine. “Do you want these little demons to follow us all over the place?” he asked, curiously.

“Why not?”

“Tarragona is theirs,” said Over, lightly. “They would annoy most women.” He hoped to provoke her to further revelation, but she made no reply, and they rambled with occasional speech through the ancient narrow streets, followed by their noisy retinue, the little Murillo faces sparkling with curiosity and foresight of illimitable wealth in coppers.

But even Catalina forgot them at times, as she and her companion stopped to decipher the Roman inscription on the foundation blocks of many of the houses. Although the houses themselves may have been younger than the huge blocks with their legends of the Scipios and the Cæsars, they were old enough, and the steep and winding streets, with the women hanging out of the high windows and sitting before the doors, all bits of color against the mellow stone, were no doubt much the same in effect as when Augustus and his hosts marched by with eagles aloft.

Catalina, who had the historic sense highly developed and had found her happiness in the past, infected Over with her enthusiasm, and he followed her without protest to the outskirts of the town, and looked down over the great valley beneath the heights of Tarragona, then up past the Cyclopean walls, those stupendous, unhewn blocks of masonry which still, for a sweep of two miles or more, surround the old town.

“What a place to hide from the world!” said Catalina. They had turned into a little street just within the wall, and seated themselves on an odd block to rest, their exhausted retinue camping all the way along the line. Opposite them was a high and narrow house, its upper balcony full of flowers, and an arcade behind suggesting the dim quiet of patio with its palms and fountain, its shadows haunted with incommunicable memories of an ancient past. “The new town we drove through with its fine houses is too commonplace; but this—any one of these eyries—what a nest! I could live quite happy up there, couldn’t you?”

“For a time.” He was too frankly modern to yield unconditionally. “But I must confess I can’t think what artists are about.”

When they reached the plaza, Catalina turned to the children and solemnly thanked them for the great pleasure and service they had rendered two belated strangers. They accepted the tribute in perfect good faith and then scrambled for the coppers.

VIII

Over and Catalina walked hastily to the hotel; they had but half an hour in which to make themselves presentable for dinner. Preparation for this function, however, was not elaborate. A tub and a change of shirt and blouse was all that could be expected of weary tourists travelling with one portmanteau each; their trunks were not to leave the stations until they reached Granada. Catalina invariably appeared in her hat, ready to go out again the moment the meal was over if she could induce Mr. Moulton to take her. Tonight the others sat down to their excellent repast in the cool dining-room without her. Mrs. Moulton and Jane were disposed to treat Over with hauteur, but thawed after the soup and fish. Mr. Moulton had long since recovered his serenity and expressed regret that he had not accompanied the more enterprising members of the party. Only Lydia, who had put on her prettiest blouse and fluffed her hair anew, was interested in neither dinner nor Tarragona.

“Off your feed?” Over was asking, sympathetically, when Mrs. Moulton, who was helping herself to the roast, dropped the fork on her plate. The others followed the direction of her astonished eyes and beheld Catalina—but not the Catalina of their habit. Hers was the largest of the portmanteaus, and it was evident that she had excavated it at last. Gone were the stiff, short skirt and ill-fitting blouse, the drooping hat and shapeless coat. She wore a girlish gown of white nun’s-veiling, made with a masterly simplicity that revealed her figure in all its long grace, its gentle curves, and supple power of endurance. Only the round throat and forearms were revealed, but the lace about them and the calm stateliness of her carriage produced the impression of full dress. Her mass of waving chestnut hair, with a sheen of gold like a web on its surface, was parted and brushed back from her oval face into a heavy knot at the base of the head. Around her throat she wore a string of pearls, and falling from her shoulders a crimson scarf.

She walked down the long room with a perfect simulation of unconsciousness, except for the lofty carriage of her head, which concealed much inward trepidation. Her broad brow was as bland as a child’s, and her eyes wore what an admirer had once called her “wondering look.” Never had her remarkable mouth looked so like a bow, the bow of her Indian ancestors. A beauty she was at last, fulfilling the uneasy prediction of her relatives. The few other people in the dining-room stared, and Captain Over, who had risen, stared at her hard.

“Ripping! Ripping!” he thought. Then, with a shock of personal pride: “She no longer looks like a cow-boy. She might be on her way to court.”

It was characteristic of Catalina that she did not even sink into her seat with one of those airy remarks with which woman demonstrates her ease in unusual circumstances. She made no remark whatever, but helped herself to the roast and fell to with a hearty appetite. Neither did she send a flash of coquetry to Captain Over; and he, with an odd sense that in her incongruity, and the hostility aroused in two of the party, she stood in need of a protector, began talking much faster than was his wont, and even condescended to tell Mr. Moulton an anecdote of the late campaign. Having gone so far he hardly could retreat, and indeed his reluctance seemed finally to be overcome. Very soon the company had forgotten Catalina, and Catalina came forth from herself and hung upon his words. Given her own way she would have been a man and a soldier, and like all normal women she exalted heroism to the head of the manly virtues. Over told no stories wherein he was the hero, but unwittingly he unrolled a panorama of infinite possibilities for the brave race of whose best he was a type. At all events, he made himself extremely interesting, and when he was finally left to Mr. Moulton and cigars, Catalina walked blindly out of the front door of the hotel, reinvoking the pictures that had stimulated her imagination. She was recalled by the pressure of a small but bony hand on her bare arm. She turned to meet the cold, blue gaze of Mrs. Moulton. That gentlewoman was very erect and very formal.

“You cannot go out alone!” she said, with disgust in her voice. “I am surprised to be forced to remind you that this is not—California. It would be impossible in your travelling costume, but dressed as for an evening’s entertainment in a private house you would be insulted at once. As long as you travel with us I must insist that you give as little trouble as possible.”

If she hoped for war, feeling herself for once secure, she was disappointed. Catalina merely shrugged her shoulders and, re-entering the hall, ascended the stair. She recalled that her room opened upon a balcony, which would answer her purpose.

The balcony hung above a garden overflowing with flowers, surrounded on three sides by the hotel and its low outbuildings, and secluded from the sloping street by a high wall. She paced up and down watching the servants under the veranda washing their dishes. They all wore a bit of the bright color beloved of the Iberian, and they made a great deal of noise. Suddenly Lydia took possession of her arm and related the adventure of the afternoon.

“Is it not dreadful?” she concluded. “A peasant! But to save my life I cannot be as furious as I should—nor help thinking of it. I feel like one of those princesses in the fairy tales beloved of the poor but wonderful youth.”

“It is highly romantic,” replied Catalina, dryly. “The setting was not all that it might have been, and I have seen too many picturesque vaqueros all my life to be deeply impressed by a handsome peasant in a blouse; but I suppose any romance is better than none in this Old World.”

She felt vaguely alarmed, and half a generation older than this silly little cousin whose suburban experience made her peculiarly susceptible to any semblance of romance in Europe; but as Lydia, repelled in her girlish confidence, drew stiffly away from her, Catalina relented with a gush of feminine sympathy.

“I really mean that a bit of romance like that makes life more endurable,” she asserted. “And you may be sure that your marquis would not have been so delicate. I wonder who he is! He certainly is a personage in his way. Of course, you’ll never see him again, but it will be something to think about when you are married to an author and correcting his type-written manuscripts!”

Lydia, mollified, laughed merrily. “I’m never going to marry any old author. Let the recording angel take note of that. I’m sick of mutual admiration societies—and all the rest of it. If I can’t do any better I’ll manage to marry some enterprising young business man and help him to grow rich.”

Catalina, who had had her own way all her life, nevertheless appreciated the colorless shallows in which her cousin had splashed of late in the vain attempt to reach a shore, and replied, sympathetically:

“Come back to California when I go and live on my ranch for a while. Out-of-doors is what you want; a far-away horizon is as good for the soul as for the eyes. And you’ll get enough of the picturesque and all the liberty you can carry—”

She paused abruptly and Lydia caught her breath. In the street below was the sound of a guitar, then of a man’s impassioned voice.

The girls stole to the edge of the balcony and looked over. There was no moon, and the vines were close. The street was thick with shadows, but they could see the lithe, active figure of a man clad in velvet jacket and smallclothes. His head was flung back and his quick, rich notes seemed to leap to the balcony above. Catalina had forgotten that her candles still burned. Their rays fell directly on the girls. The man saw them and his voice burst forth in such peremptory volume, ringing against the walls of the narrow street, that heads began to appear at many windows.

“It is that peasant we saw on the train to-day,” said Over’s amused voice behind the girls. “He was in the café a moment ago and is got up in full peasant finery. You made a conquest, Miss Lydia.”

Catalina felt her companion give an ecstatic shiver, but omitted to pull her back as she leaned recklessly over the rail. Her own spirit seemed to swirl in that glorious tide. She threw back her head, staring at the black velvet skies of Spain with their golden music, then turned slowly and regarded the old white walls and gardens about her, the palms and the riot of flowers and vine, invoking the image of Cæsar himself prowling in the night to the lattice of inviting loveliness in a mantilla. She wished she had draped her own about her head, and wondered if Over shared her vision.

But he was merely marvelling at her beauty, and wondering if he should ever get as far as California. He would like to see her in that patio she had described to him, with its old mission fountain, its gigantic date-palms through whose bending branches the sun never penetrated, the big-leaved banana-tree heavy with yellow fruit, the scarlet hammock, the mountains rising just behind the old house. She had described it to him only that afternoon, and he had received a vivid impression of it all, and of the deep verandas and the cool, austere rooms within. It had struck him as a delightful retreat after the strife of the world, and he wondered if under that eternally blue sky, in that Southern land of warmth and color, where the very air caressed, he could not forget even the broad demesne of his ancestors, a demesne that would never be his, but where he was always a welcome guest. She had told him that her estate—her “ranch”—went right down to the sea; it was, in fact, a wide valley, closed with the Pacific at one end, and a range of mountains immediately behind the house. It had seemed to him the ideal existence as she described it, a perfect balance of the intellectual and the out-door life, of boundless freedom and unvarying health; and all in an atmosphere of perfect peace. He had envied her at the moment, but had philosophically concluded that in the long run a man’s club most nearly filled the bill. He fancied, however, that he should correspond with her, and one of these days pay her a visit.

“Best remember that this is the land of passion, not of idle flirtation, Miss Lydia,” he said, warningly, as the music ceased for a moment. “What is play to you might be death to that Johnny down there.”

For answer Lydia plucked a rose and dropped it into a lithe brown hand that shot up to meet it.