As he rode along young Thurston nursed his wrath to keep it warm. At the same time the desire to possess the girl for her own sake began to inflame his imagination. Unscrupulous passion had been bred in the very bone of this worthless degenerate. Just as his father, Ben Thurston, had thirty years before trampled on the virtue of the young Spanish beauty, Senorita Rosetta, the sister of Don Manuel, so now was the son hatching in his brain a foul plot of spoliation. “I’ll get even with Willoughby, by God, in the very way that will hurt his pride the most. Women!—pshaw, they’re all alike. And she’s a peacherino all right—those flashing dark eyes—she sure looks good to me.” This was now the tenor of his musing as his pony cantered up the slope to La Siesta. He advanced on foot to the portico with a swagger and a smile, and there, as luck would have it, he found Merle seated in a rocker, reading, and alone. She rose with quiet courtesy and returned his greeting. “I am sorry,” she said, “mother is not at home. She and my sister Grace have driven over to the dairy. We have a model dairy, you know, on La Siesta,” she went on, anxious to make conversation that would not prove embarrassing. For already she divined some particular object in the young man’s visit, knowing as she did that he and Willoughby had recently exchanged angry words. “Won’t you show me your famous rose gardens?” asked Thurston, boldly. “With pleasure,” she replied, assenting with a sweet smile of politeness, although there was sore reluctance in her heart, as she stepped from under the portico. But, unknown to herself, she did not go unattended, for as Merle and her visitor passed round the house and through the shrubberies there glided after them the figure of a woman, clothed in black, wearing over her head and shoulders a Spanish mantilla. It was Tia Teresa, the ever watchful duenna. The roses of La Siesta, as Marshall Thurston had said, were indeed famous. Here were all the finest varieties, growing in the perfection to which only care and scientific skill applied under ideal climatic conditions can attain. Merle was glad to point out the different blooms and give them their names—the topic was certainly an innocuous one, and she smiled at the thought as they strolled along. She was vaguely wondering, too, whether Dick Willoughby would approve even this slight measure of courtesy toward the visitor to her home. Although she had as yet not the remotest conception that the quarrel at the round-up had been in any way connected with her name, she knew that the two young men were at daggers drawn, and toward Dick there was the instinctive loyalty in her heart that prompted her to count his enemies as her enemies, his friends as her friends.