"It has come at last—I always said it would—I never trusted that double nature of hers!" she exclaimed triumphantly, pausing for an instant in her work of assorting the linen. The expression and gesture of Señora Sanchez plainly bespoke the shock she also had experienced.
"To think of it," she gasped. "How Padre Antonio can overlook such a breach of confidence and offense to the Church is more than I can understand!"
"Ah! that shows the extent of her influence over him," answered Señora. "She has bewitched him with her wild ways—he simply dotes on her!"
"It's scandalous!" broke in her sister.
"To my mind, it shows signs of the Padre's failing," rejoined the Señora sharply.
"It does indeed—poor man!" sighed her sister. "And what's more—it never did seem proper that so handsome a woman should live with a priest even though she be his ward and he an old man."
"Handsome?" sneered the Señora, drawing herself together as though she had received an electric shock; the pleased and animated expression of her face changing suddenly to one of utmost frigidity. "I never could understand why people considered that Indian good looking," and her black eyes snapped as she turned to resume her work, plainly betraying the jealousy aroused. Señora Sanchez, knowing her sister's temper only too well, hastened to change the subject.
Strange to say, Padre Antonio did not share the public's sentiment, or rather that of his own particular flock, concerning Chiquita's latest escapade. Instead of being overwhelmed, broken in spirit and utterly cast down by grief and shame as had been confidently predicted, he, much to the disgust of his congregation, went calmly about his duties as though nothing unusual had occurred, referring jocosely to this lark of his madcap ward as he was pleased to term it.
Lark? Heavens! had the Padre lost his senses? Excommunication might be a little too severe, but a year's solitary confinement in a convent as a penance for her sin was the least penalty she could expect.
But Padre Antonio knew what the rest of the world did not. That his charming, irrepressible protegée would have snapped her fingers lightly at the mere suggestion of either. The days of mediæval suppression of females had come to an end even in Mexico.