Chinita laughed merrily. “What! a coward still, and with the old stories we used to tell still first in your mind? Ah, I have tales to tell now will be worth your hearing.” She bent low and added in a whisper, “Have they not told you? I have the place of the Señorita Herlinda now! I have her room. I think sometimes she must be dead, and I have risen in her stead. Do I look like a ghost, Chata?”
“Hush, hush!” entreated Chata. “Oh Chinita, I wish I never had gone away. Oh, how shall I live now? How can I bear it?”
At that moment Doña Feliz approached, and evading her proffered embrace the young girl bent her head on the arm of the woman and burst into tears. Chinita stood confounded; the light and joyousness died out of her face; a certain half-savage look of inquiry came over it. She turned abruptly to the young officer,—
“What have they done to her?” she demanded.
“Chinita,” said a cold, impassive voice, “this gentleman is a stranger to you. It is not seemly that you stand here questioning him;” and with an imperious wave of her hand, Doña Isabel seemed actually to force the two apart.
Almost unconsciously the young man drew back, bowing low, and Chinita turned to the staircase; yet as she obeyed the movement of Doña Isabel’s hand a furious rage possessed her. As she stepped upon the first stair, some demon prompted her to wind her arm around Chata’s neck and raise her tear-stained face.
“I am going to the Señorita Herlinda’s room,” she said. “I am there in her place; and—” here she stopped, laughed, and threw a glance over her shoulder—“there is the American!”
Her last words had been prompted by a glimpse of Ashley Ward as he crossed the court. He caught the appellation, and bowed and smiled. Chinita ran up the stairs, and Doña Isabel stood rigid with a face like death. Her eyes were resting however on Chata’s countenance.
The young girl had shrunk within Doña Feliz’s protecting arm. Had Doña Isabel turned her eyes upon the woman’s defiant yet apprehensive face, it might have been a revelation to her; but she looked at Don Rafael.
“Your daughter has a strange face and strange ways for a ranchero’s daughter,” she said, with an attempt at irony; but it failed. Her face worked painfully as she added, “She reminds me of those I would forget. We have strange fancies as we grow old.”