Marcelino talked long with his aunt, telling her of his adventures in Buenos Aires during the English occupation. As he told of the affair at Perdriel and of the defeat of the English on the 12th August, she caught up her little son in her arms, pressing him to her bosom with unwonted animation, saying as she caressed him:
"Ah, Justiniano, my little son! your mother will take better care of you, she will never let you run away from her, nor fight fierce soldiers who come over the sea!"
"The soldiers, mamita!" said the boy laughing, and patting her cheek with his little hand; "I have never seen a soldier, but when I am big like this one then I will put myself to kill the English. All of them, mamita, all of them."
As he said this he struggled from his mother's arms, and rolling over a cushion, clambered down from the estrade, and running up to Lieutenant Gordon clenched his little fist and struck him on the leg.
"This is one," he said; "some day when I am big I will kill you."
Marcelino rose hurriedly from his chair, and Don Fausto walked quickly to the spot with a look of great annoyance on his face, but Gordon stooping down to the boy lifted him up in his arms and kissed him, saying with a merry laugh:
"When you are as big as I am, my little man, we English will be great friends with you, and will know better than to come here to fight you."
"Thanks, my friend, thanks," said Don Fausto, taking his free hand in both his own. "With years we shall all of us learn a little wisdom."
Justiniano looked wonderingly from one to the other with a finger in his mouth to aid his reflections, then seizing hold of one of Gordon's whiskers he whispered in his ear: