"A man—a priest—learned it from him some way. I thought the Americanos had no saints; but something like a love for a saint keeps Keith Bryton from caring much for any one else. It is as if a woman, instead of a wooden saint, should be in one of the niches of the old altar-place, and he said prayers there. Whoever she is, she seems to be very far above him—like the star he cannot reach."
"The men who cannot reach the stars content themselves with picking flowers, do they not?"
"Oh, God alone knows how they content themselves! I only tell you this thing to show you that Señor Bryton has not anywhere in the land a woman to go to him if he were dying alone in the hills; his saint would not step down from the niche of the altar-place."
"Anita mia, you forget," she said, in a strange, mocking tone. "If Keith Bryton is a friend of yours, you should wish him better fortune than to kneel at a place like our old altar. Do you forget that of the eleven niches still left in the old ruin, only one holds a saint,—a saint where no one openly kneels,—that of the Maria Madalena?"
"Raquel, what things you do fancy! Now that you know whom you may have to meet, will you ride with me, or back to the road?"
"Back to the plaza?" asked Doña Raquel. "Anita mia, all this has come to me in the inner court of the aliso portal: it does not belong to the outer world; neither do we, I think, to-night. Whatever the shadows of the cañon cover for us, I think, we must ride upward to meet them. Your friend's saint, the Madalena of the niche, will watch over us. When we go back she shall have candles and roses—red ones, Anita!"
Ana was voluble in her delight, and rode up the valley with a great load lifted from her heart.
But the witching spell of the aliso portal had lost its gay charm for Raquel, or else it had sent her another more potent, for she rode in silence under the stars, without gladness, yet so steadily, so recklessly, that Ana more than once had to complain that only a deer or a coyote could keep ahead of her.