When Don Joaquin returned, he was in an unusually bad temper, and it was well that Mariquita had gone to bed. Gore was sitting up, and, though it was long past Sarella's usual hour, she had insisted on sitting up also. This was good-natured of her, for there was no pleasure to be anticipated from the interview with Don Joaquin, and she disliked any derangement of her habits. Gore had begged her to retire at her ordinary hour, but she had flatly refused.

"I can do more with him than you can," she declared, quite truly, "though no one will be able to stop his being as savage as a bear. I'm sorry for Mariquita; she'll have a bad time to-morrow, and it won't end with to-morrow."

Meanwhile she took the trouble to have ready a good supper for Don Joaquin, and made rather a special toilette in which to help him to it. Sarella was not in the least afraid of him, and had no great dread of a row which concerned someone else. Don Joaquin was not, however, particularly mollified by the becoming dress, nor by finding his betrothed sitting up for him, as she was sitting up with Gore.

"Where's Mariquita?" he asked, as he sat down to eat.

"In bed long ago. I hope you'll like that chicken; it's done in a special way we have, and the recipe's my patent. I haven't taught it to Mariquita."

"Why aren't you in bed?"

"Because I preferred waiting to see you safe at home," Sarella replied with an entrancing smile.

"Was Mr. Gore anxious too?" Don Joaquin demanded sarcastically.

"It is not a quarter of an hour later than my usual time for going to bed," Gore answered. "And I thought it better to see you; you would, I believe, have expected to see me."

"Very well. You have done as you said?"

"Yes." Gore glanced at Sarella, and Don Joaquin told her that she had now better sit up no longer.

"I think I had," she told him; "I know all about it."

"Is it all settled?" Don Joaquin asked, looking at Gore. "Have you fixed it up?"

Gore found this abruptness and haste made his task very difficult.

He had to consider how to form his reply.

"He proposed to Mariquita," Sarella cut in, "but she refused him."

"Refused him!" Don Joaquin almost shouted.

"Unfortunately, it is so," Gore was beginning, but his host interrupted him.

"I do not choose she should refuse," he said angrily. "I will tell her so before you see her in the morning."

Gore was angry himself, and rose from his seat.

"No," he said; "I will not agree to that. She knows her own mind, and it will not change. You must not persecute her on my account."

"It is not on your account. I choose to have duty and obedience from my own daughter."

"Joaquin," said Sarella (Gore had never before heard her call him by his Christian name), "it is no use taking it that way. Mariquita is not undutiful, and you must know it. But she will not marry Mr. Gore—or anybody."

"Of course she will marry," cried the poor girl's father fiercely. "That is the duty of every girl."

Sarella slightly smiled.

"Then many girls do not do their duty," she said, in her even, unimpassioned tones.

Her elderly fiancÉ was about to burst into another explosion, but she would not let him.

"Many Catholic girls," she reminded him, "remain unmarried."

"To be nuns—that is different."

"It is my belief," she observed in a detached manner, as if indulging in a mere surmise, "that Mariquita will be a nun."

"Mariquita! Has she said so?" he demanded sharply.

"Not to me," Sarella replied, quite unconcernedly.

"Nor to me," Gore explained; "nevertheless, I believe it will be so."

"That depends on me," the girl's father asserted with an unpleasant mixture of annoyance and obstinacy. "I intend her to marry."

"Only a Protestant," said Sarella, with a shrewd understanding of Don Joaquin that surprised Gore, "would marry her if she believes she has a vocation to be a nun. I should think a Catholic man would be ashamed to do it. He would expect a judgment on himself and his children."

Don Joaquin was as angry as ever, as savage as ever, but he was startled. Both his companions could see this. Gore was astonished at Sarella's speech, and at her acumen. He had wished to have this interview with Mariquita's father to himself, but already saw that Sarella knew how to conduct it better than he did. She had clearly been quite willing that "the old man" (as he disrespectfully called him in his own mind) should fly out and give way to his fiery temper at once; the more of it went off now, the less would remain for poor Mariquita to endure.

"If I were a Catholic man," Sarella continued cooly, "I should think it profane to make a girl marry me who had given herself to be a nun. I expect the Lord would punish it." She paused meditatively, and then added, "and all who joined in pushing her to it. I know I wouldn't join. I think folks have enough of their own to answer for, without bringing judgments down on their heads for things like that. It won't get me to heaven to help in interfering between Mariquita and her way of getting there."

All the while she spoke, Sarella seemed to be admiring, with her head turned on one side, the prettiness of her left wrist on which was a gold bangle, with a crystal heart dangling from it. Don Joaquin had given her the bangle, and himself admired the heart chiefly because it was crystal and not of diamonds.

"Isn't it pretty?" she said, looking suddenly up and catching his eye watching her.

"I thought you hadn't cared much for it," he answered, greatly pleased. He had always known she would have preferred a smaller heart if crusted with diamonds.

Gore longed to laugh. She astonished and puzzled him. Her cleverness was a revelation to him, and her good-nature, her subtlety, and her earnestness—for he knew she had been in earnest in what she said about not daring to interfere with other people's ways of getting to heaven.

"That old man who instructs her," he thought, "must have taught her a lot."

Of course, on his own account, he was no more afraid of Don Joaquin than she was. But he had been terribly afraid of the hard old man on Mariquita's, and he was deeply grateful to Sarella.

"Sir," he said, "what she has said to you I do feel myself. I am a Catholic—and the dearest of my sisters is a nun. I should have hated and despised any man who had tried to spoil her life by snatching it to himself against her will. He would have to be a wicked fellow, and brutal, and impious. God's curse would lie on him. So it would on me if I did that hideous thing, though God knows to-day has brought me the great disappointment of my life. Life can never be for me what I have been hoping it might be. Never."

Sarella, listening, and knowing that the two men were looking at each other, smiled at her bangle, and softly shook the dangling heart to make the crystal give as diamond-like a glitter as possible. Gore's life, she thought, would come all right. She had done her best valorously for Mariquita; women, in her theory, behooved to do their best for each other against masculine tyrrany ("bossishness," she called it), but all the time she was half-savage, herself, with the girl for not being willing to be happy in so obviously comfortable a way as offered. It seemed to her "wasteful" that so pretty a girl should go and be a nun; if she had been "homely" like Sister Aquinas it would have been different. But Sarella had learned from Sister Aquinas that these matters were above her, and was quite content to accept them without understanding them.

"Ever since I came here," Gore was saying, "I have lived in a dream of what life would be—if I could join hers with mine. It was only a dream, and I had to awake."

Don Joaquin did not understand his mind, but he was able now to see that the young man suffered, and had received a blow that, somehow, would change his life, and turn its course aside.

"Anything," Gore said, in a very low, almost thankful tone, "is better than it would have been if I had changed my dream for a nightmare; it would have been that, if I had to think of myself as trying to pull her down, from her level to mine, of her as having been brought down. I meant to do her all possible good, all my life long. How can I wish to have done her the greatest harm? As it would have been if, out of fear or over-persuasion, she had been brought to call herself my wife who could be no man's wife."

("How he loves her!" thought Sarella.)

("I doubt it has wrecked him a bit," thought Don Joaquin.)