"Dios! Prudencia, you had an inspiration from heaven this day. What I have been through! the sole comfort is that I have lost twenty pounds at least, from sheer anxiety. Imagine that you had not been gone an hour, when up they ride, the guerrilla that was reported to us yesterday. At their head, that pestiferous Col. Diego Moreno. He dismounts, demands coffee, bananas, what there is. I go to get them; and, the saints aiding me, I meet in the face the pretty Manuela. Another instant, and she would have been on the verandah, would have been seen by these swine, female curiosity having led her to imagine a necessary errand in that direction. I seize this charming child by the shoulders, I push her into her room. I tell her, 'Thou hast a dangerous fever. Go to thy bed on the instant, it is a matter of thy life.'
"My countenance is such that she obeys without a word. She is an admirable creature! Beauty, in the female sex—"
"Do go on, Noonsey," said his wife, good-naturedly, "and never mind about beauty now. Land knows we have got other things to think about."
"It is true, it is true, my own!" replied the amiable fat man. "I return to the verandah. This man is striding up and down, cutting at my poor vines with his apoplexy of a whip. He calls me; I stand before him thus, civil but erect.
"'Have you any strangers here, Don Annunzio?'
"'No, Señor Colonel.'
"It is true, señorita. To make a stranger of you, so friendly, so gracious—the thought is intolerable.
"He approaches, he regards me fixedly.
"'A young lady, Señorita Montfort, and her maid, escaped from the carriage of her stepmother, the honourable Señora Montfort, while on the way to the convent of the White Sisters, ten days ago. A man of my command was taken by these hill-cats of Mambis, and carried to a camp in this neighbourhood. He escaped, and reported to me that a young lady and her attendant were in the camp. I raided the place yesterday.'
"'With success, who can doubt?' I said. Civility may be used even to the devil, whom this officer strongly resembled.