LITMIR.BIZ

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lip was, she saw two riders, a man and a woman. A moment after she caught sight of them they disappeared – had ridden down into the river-bed. The trail had guided them, and they could miss neither the way nor the ford.

      Nevertheless she walked towards where they were – though her father might possibly have thought her doing so out of place.

      CHAPTER III

      Up over the sandy river-bed came the two strangers, and Mariquita stood awaiting them.

      The woman might be thirty, and was, she perceived (to whom a saddle was easier than a chair) unused to riding. She was a pretty woman, with a sort of foolish amiability of manner that might mean nothing. The man was younger – perhaps by three years, and rode as if he had always known how to do it, but without being saddle-bred, without living chiefly on horseback.

      His companion was much aware of his being handsome, but Mariquita did not think of that. She, however, liked him immediately – much better than she liked the lady. The lady was not, in fact, quite a lady; but the young man was a gentleman; and perhaps Mariquita had never known one.

      "Is this," inquired the blonde lady – pointing, though inaccurately, as if to indicate Mariquita's home, "where Mr. Xeres lives, please?"

      She pronounced the X like the x's in Artaxerxes.

      "Certainly. He is my father."

      "Then your mother is my Aunt Margaret," said the lady in the smart clothes that looked so queer on an equestrian.

      "My mother unfortunately is dead," Mariquita informed her, with a simplicity that made the wide-open blue eyes open wider still, and caused their owner to decide that the girl was "awfully Spanish."

      Miss Sarah Jackson assumed (with admirable readiness) an expression of pathos.

      "How very sad! I do apologize," she murmured, as if the decease of her aunt were partly her fault.

      The young man was amused – not for the first time – by his fellow-traveller: but he did not show it.

      "You couldn't help it," said Mariquita.

      ("How very Spanish!" thought her cousin.)

      "Of course you did not know," the girl added, "or you would not have said anything to hurt me. And my mother's death happened five years ago."

      "Not really!" cried the deceased lady's niece. "How wholly unexpected!"

      "It wasn't very sudden," Mariquita explained. "She was ill for three months."

      "My father was quite unaware of it – entirely so. He died, in fact, just about that time. And Aunt Margaret and he were (so unfortunately!) hardly on terms. Personally I always (though a child) had the strongest affection for Aunt Margaret. I took her part about her marriage. Papa's own second marriage struck me as less defensible."

      "My father only married once," said Mariquita; "he is a widower."

      "Oh, quite so! I wish mine had remained so. My stepmother – but we all have our faults, no doubt. We did not live agreeably after her third marriage – " (Mariquita was getting giddy, and so, perhaps, was Miss Jackson's fellow-traveller.)

      "I could not, in fact, live," that lady serenely continued, with a smile of lingering sweetness, "and finally we differed completely. (Not noisily, on my part, nor roughly but irrevocably.) Hence my resolve to turn to Aunt Margaret, and my presence here – blood is thicker than water, when you come to think of it."

      "I met Miss Jackson at – ," her fellow-traveller explained, "and we made acquaintance – "

      "Introduced by Mrs. Plosher," Miss Jackson put in again with singular sweetness. "Mrs. Plosher's boarding-house was recommended to me by two ministers. Mr. Gore was likewise her guest, and coming, as she was aware, to your father's."

      Don Joaquin, besides the regular cowboys, had from time to time taken a sort of pupil or apprentice, who paid instead of being paid. Mariquita had not been informed that this Mr. Gore was expected.

      "So," Mr. Gore added, "I begged Miss Jackson to use one of my horses, and I have been her escort."

      "So coincidental!" observed that lady, shaking her head slightly. "Though really – now I find my aunt no longer presiding here – I really– "

      CHAPTER IV

      Don Joaquin expressed no surprise at Mr. Gore's arrival, and no rapture at that of Miss Jackson. But he appeared to take it for granted both would remain – as they did.

      He saw more of the young man than of the young woman, which seemed to Mariquita to account for his preferring the latter. She had to see more of the lady. Miss Jackson was undeniably pretty, and instantly recognized as such by the cowboys: but she "kept her distance," and largely ignored their presence – a fact not unobserved by Don Joaquin, who inwardly commended her prudence. Of Mr. Gore she took more notice, as was natural, owing to their previous acquaintance. She spoke of him, however, to her host, as a lad, and hinted that at her age, lads were tedious; while frequent in allusion to a certain Eastern friend of hers (Mr. Bluck, a man of large means and great capacity) whose married daughter was her closest acquaintance.

      "Carolina was older than me at school," she would admit, "but she was more to my taste than those of my own age. Maturity wins me. Youth is so raw!"

      "What you call underdone," suggested Don Joaquin, who had talked English for forty years, and translated it still, in his mind, into Spanish.

      "Just that," Sarah agreed. "You grasp me."

      He didn't then, though he would sooner or later, thought the cowboys.

      Miss Jackson, then, ignored the cowboys, and gave all the time she could spare from herself to Mariquita. When not with Mariquita she was sewing, being an indefatigable dressmaker. She called it her "studies."

      "It is essential (out here in the wilderness) that I should not neglect my studies, and run to seed," she would say, as she smilingly retreated into her bedroom, where there were no books.

      Mariquita would not have been sorry had she "studied" more. Sarah did not fit into her old habits of life, and when they were together Mariquita felt lonelier than she had ever done before. Indoors she did not find the young woman so incongruous – but when they were out on the prairie together the elder girl seemed somehow altogether impossible to reconcile with it.

      "One might sketch," Miss Jackson would observe. "One ought to keep up one's sketching: I feel it to be a duty – don't you?"

      "No. I can't sketch. It can't be a duty in my case."

      "Ah, but in mine! I know I ought. But there's no feature." And she slowly waved her parasol round the horizon as though defying a "feature" to supervene from any point of the compass.

      Though she despised her present neighborhood, Sarah never hinted at any intention of leaving it: and it became apparent that her host would not have liked her to go away. That her presence was a great thing for Mariquita it suited him to assume, but he saw no necessity for discussing the matter, nor ascertaining what might in fact be his daughter's opinion.

      "I think," he said instead, "it will be better we call your cousin 'Sarella'. It is her name Sarah and Ella. 'Sarella' sounds more fitting."

      So he and Mariquita thenceforth called her "Sarella."

      CHAPTER V

      Don Joaquin never thought much of Robert Gore; he failed, from the first, to "take to him." It had not delighted him that "Sarella" should arrive under his escort, though how she could have made her way up from Maxwell without him, he did not trouble to discuss with himself. At first he had thought it almost inevitable that the young man should make those services of his a claim to special intimacy with the lady to whom he had accidentally been useful. As it became apparent that Gore made no such claim, and was not peculiarly inclined to intimacy with his late fellow-traveller, Don Joaquin was half disposed to take umbrage, as though the young man were in a manner slighting Miss Jackson – his own wife's niece.

      As there were only two women about the place, indifference to one of

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