"I was a good deal freer than the other Managuayan girls and I got the name of being very daring. Much was excused me because I was half-American. I was the one who got up the private theatricals and took the boys' parts myself. The old ladies talked with bated breath of how I rode and hunted in knickerbockers. I loved to shock them. You do not know our Spanish dowagers. They acted on me like a perpetual dare.
"I never saw my dear Uncle Tony after I went to live with the de Socotras. I missed him at first, but it was delicately intimated to me that he was really not one of us, and after awhile I believed it. Little girls are natural snobs. When I grew up I began to understand that Francisco and Uncle Tony were on opposite sides in politics. In Managuay men become extraordinarily bitter over politics. In our house Uncle Tony was called renegade, socialist, traitor to his class, atheist, and I don't know what. I had only the vaguest idea of what was meant by politics. I never read the newspapers.
"I cannot give you any idea of the situation in Managuay at present except to say that in a general way Uncle Tony was on the side of the poor people and Francisco, of course, on the side of the rich. I sided with Francisco naturally. They told me the poor people were envious and discontented; that if they were not kept under, they would burn and destroy and never rest until they had made us as poor as themselves.
"One day in Managuay,—it is really only a week ago, though it seems like seven years, I have traveled so far since,—we were still at Casa del Monte, the country house, and Nina came to me—at home Nina is my own maid, though when we travel she serves both Mamma and me,—Nina came to me and said that a gentleman wished to speak to me and that he was waiting under the banyan tree in the Jardin des Plantes.
"For a moment I was very indignant at the idea of any man bidding me to a rendezvous through my maid, but I saw from the expression on Nina's face that this was no ordinary cavalier. I asked her who it was. 'Señor Bareda,' she said in a scared way; 'He said to tell you, your Uncle Tony.'
"Well, at the mere sound of the dear name a sudden warmth flooded my breast. I forgot all the harsh things I had heard said about him in that house; I forgot that I considered myself on the other side from him; I remembered only the days when he had taken me on his knee and recited funny rhymes about the King of the Cannibal Islands. I ran to him as fast as I could go.
"The Jardin des Plantes was Francisco's private botanical gardens, planned after the famous gardens in Martinique. It occupied a great stretch of level ground at the foot of the hill on which the house was built. Trees, shrubs and flowers from every quarter of the earth were growing there. The banyan tree is famous in Managuay. It is far from the house, but near the public road on the other side. It made a little natural arbor all to itself, and there was a stone bench under it, on which I found my Uncle Tony sitting. I wondered who had steered him to the spot.
"He looked so sad and kind and patient, and he was not at all fashionably dressed, that my heart went right out to him; the selfish, self-indulgent years slipped away and I felt like a child again. He won me before he said a word. He kissed me on the forehead as he used to do, and said smiling:
"'Is it very wrong for a gentleman to ask for a secret meeting with a young lady if he is sixty-four years old, and she his niece? If I had gone to the house I should not have been admitted.'
"'But how did you get here?' I asked. 'How did you get hold of Nina?'