When Blythe started forth on that summer day it was with all good and dutiful intention to call for Christine and Alison and duly escort them to his home, and he took pleasure in the errand although of late his ardor had somewhat abated in Alison’s direction, a fact which he did not confess to himself and would have repudiated had he been charged with it. The young man was now twenty-one, entirely a marriageable age in that southern country where eighteen was none too young for a man to marry and where girls of fifteen were often wives. At twenty-five John Ross and Neal Jordan were considered quite old bachelors. Blythe had paid court to Alison from the time of his arrival in the neighborhood, but had been treated as a mere comrade by the girl. During the period of his enforced stay in Pedro’s little cabin when his mother was established under the Rosses’ roof, he began to weary a little of hearing Alison’s praises sung constantly by his mother and sisters, and finally, in that spirit of contradiction which is so very human, he wished that they could find her less desirable. What a young man’s family are eager for him to possess seldom seems attractive to him, however much he may have thought of the object in the first place. And so because every one said what an admirable wife Alison Boss would make for Blythe Van Dorn, he began to wonder if she would. Nevertheless he did not cease his attentions and always enjoyed being in her company, while she, never sentimentally inclined, had no disposition to alter their relation. Blythe pondered over the situation as he rode slowly along. There was no other girl whom he had met who was so well suited to be his wife, he was obliged to admit, yet while he gravely considered the question of trying his fate, ever and anon in place of her merry face came a more serious one, Madonna-like in its beauty, a pair of wonderful dark eyes shaded by long lashes looked into his, and a gently anxious voice said in hesitating English: “You are better, señor?” He persistently put away the image and as persistently it recurred. He recalled days of dull pain when the only pleasures were his mother’s presence and the fleeting vision of that beautiful, serious face appearing once in a while at the door. Later on, when only the languor and weariness of convalescence possessed him, little Lolita sometimes sat an hour with him while his mother took her meals, and then he found pleasure in watching the fringe of eyelash droop over the clear pallor of the cheek, and the grave red lips curve into a smile at some word of his. The pretty hesitating English, too, amused him and at last became truly fascinating, more so than Alison’s direct speech.