"Certainly, child, if you wish. Only pray use discretion. Scandal is very odious, and there is never the least need to incur it if you observe care in these little affairs. You have only to look at me." Dominica did look at her, almost aghast. "Aunt!" "What is it now?" inquired Doña Beatrice, lifting her eyes for a moment. "You did not suppose that I married your uncle for love, did you?" Dominica felt herself to be young and foolish, at a disadvantage. "I did not know, señora, but for myself I do not mean to wed my cousin. He is--he is--in short, señora, I do not care for him." Her aunt only looked at her with the tolerant amusement she found so galling, and would say no more. But the matter was not to be so easily allowed to slide. Don Diego's attentions became more marked; he was impervious to rebuffs, just as his mother was impervious to argument. Dominica felt Beauvallet's signet ring lying snug in her bosom, and turned a shoulder on Don Diego's advances. She would look at the ring sometimes when she was alone and remember how it had been given to her, and what words had gone with it. She had been induced to believe then, under the influence of that dominant personality. Even now when she conjured up Beauvallet's image before her mind's eye, and saw again his laughing face, and the turn of his dark head, a little of that belief would come stealing back to her. It could not long endure. There, upon the high seas, anything had seemed possible; here in grave Spain it was as though that swift romance had only existed in her imagination. She had only a ring to remind her of its reality; if her heart still cherished its secret hope, her brain rejected it, and knew Beauvallet's coming to be an impossibility. Perhaps he had forgotten; perhaps he was even now teasing some English lady in the way he had used to her. Yet he had said: "I shall not forget," and he had not been jesting then. She wondered what her aunt would say if she knew but the half of it. Anyone else, Dominica thought, would be horrified, but she could not imagine Doña Beatrice roused to so strenuous an emotion. Probably she would laugh at the romance; she who had had lovers enough in her day might even sympathise with her niece, but it was very certain that she would not see in the brief idyll a bar to marriage with Diego. Dominica had been careful from the outset to hide that piece of the past from her aunt. She showed an admirable indifference to Beauvallet, knowing that such an attitude would be the least suspicious. She said that she thought his powers overrated: he was nothing beyond the ordinary, to be sure. It was not caution made her so reticent, for she could not think that she would ever see Sir Nicholas again, but she had a dread of letting her aunt into her confidence. Doña Beatrice was like a snail, she thought, trailing a sticky poison in her wake. What she touched she soiled; all virtue was made to seem a little foolish; all vice was merely smiled upon.