“Would you, really? How strange that seems—just children like us. Let me see. We learn Spanish and behavior—when we don’t forget it—from the Mestizas. They are never, never rude. Even when they stab a man in the back they do it courteously. So Miguel says.”
“What? What! You dreadful child! Are you taught stabbing, also, in this modern school of philosophy?” demanded the elder Mr. Disbrow, nervously glancing toward his dark-skinned servants.
Carlos rolled upon the grass, boisterously laughing. Then, suddenly remembering the “courtesy” which he boasted of having studied, sat up and apologized.
The apology accepted, the inquiry followed:
“Do you like to speak the Spanish you are taught?”
“Oh! I love it! You can say such things in it. They seem to mean more, ’specially if you’re angry. But our father doesn’t wish us to use it very much. He says we must first acquire pure English. He is very particular himself. But isn’t it hard to be grammar-y?” asked Carlota, not to be left out of the conversation.
“Very. Yet, I think your father couldn’t have greatly objected to the Spanish, since he gave you such pretty Spanish names,” answered Mr. Rupert.
“That was our mother’s doing. She named us. See? That is where she sleeps. That is her grave.”
The little girl stood up and pointed to a clump of agave plants, in the midst of which rose a flower-decked mound, with a simply-inscribed, natural boulder at its head.
After a hasty exchange of glances, with one impulse, the strangers rose and quietly walked to the spot Carlota had designated. For a little time they stood there, with bowed heads, as if doing reverence to the slumbering dust below, then gravely turned away. They did not again sit down in the “schoolroom” and, immediately, Mr. Rupert asked the children to guide them to the house.