A few months later when passing I saw this same lady once more, and on this occasion she was coming to the gate as I rode by, and I saw her closely, for she turned and looked at me, not unseeingly like the old man, and her face was perfectly colourless and her large dark eyes the most sorrowful I had ever seen. That was my last sight of her, nor did I see any human creature about the house after that for about two years. Then one hot summer day I caught sight of three persons who looked like servants or caretakers, sitting in the shade some distance from the house and drinking maté, the tea of the country. Here, thought I, is an opportunity not to be lost--one long waited for! Leaving my horse at the gate I went to them, and addressing a large woman, the most important-looking person of the three, as politely as I could, I said I was not, as they perhaps imagined, a long absent friend or relation returned from the wars, but a perfect stranger, a traveller on the great south road; that I was hot and thirsty, and the sight of them refreshing themselves in that pleasant shade had tempted me to intrude myself upon them. She received me with smiles and a torrent of welcoming words, and the expected invitation to sit down and drink maté with them. She was a very large woman, very fat and very dark, of that reddish or mahogany colour which, taken with the black eyes and coarse black hair, is commonly seen in persons of mixed blood--Iberian with aboriginal. I took her age to be about fifty years. And she was as voluble as she was fat and dark, and poured out such a stream of talk on or rather over me like warm greasy water, and so forcing me to keep my eyes on her, that it was almost impossible to give any attention to the other two. One was her husband, Spanish and dark too, but with a different sort of darkness; a skeleton of a man with a bony ghastly face, in old frayed workman's clothes and dust-covered boots; his hands very grimy. And the third person was their daughter, as they called her, a girl of fifteen with a clear white and pink skin, regular features, beautiful grey eyes and light brown hair. A perfect type of a nice looking English girl such as one finds in any village, in almost any cottage, in the Midlands or anywhere else in this island.