“If I’d known you had been born there I’d have gone on a pilgrimage to find that cabin if it had taken a month.”
“But I tell you it can’t be standing yet. I’m twenty-four years old—” she suddenly realized that this, too, was part of the necessary web of misstatement in which she was caught. The color deepened on her face into a conscious blush. She dropped her eyes, then raising them to his with a curious defiance, said:
“No—that’s a mistake. I’m—I’m—more than that, I’m twenty-five, nearly twenty-six.”
Barron, who saw nothing in the equivocation but a girl’s foolish desire to understate her age, burst into delighted laughter, and pressing the hand on his arm against his side, said:
“Why, I always thought you were years older than that—thirty to thirty-five at least.”
And he looked with teasing eyes into her face. But this time Mariposa did not laugh, nor even smile. The joy had suddenly gone out of her, and she walked on in silence, her head drooped, seeming in some mysterious way to have grown suddenly anxious and preoccupied.
“There’s the house,” she said at length. “I was getting tired.”
“There’s a light in the parlor,” said Barron, as he opened the gate. “What can be the matter? Has Benito killed grandma, or is there a party?”
Their doubts on this point were soon set at rest. Their approaching footsteps evidently were heard by a listening ear within, for the hall door opened and Benito appeared in the aperture.
“There’s a man to see you in the parlor,” he announced to Mariposa.