But before he had gone very far, the Maestro began to fumble at his jacket. With some difficulty he drew from some inward recess a little buckskin bag, and when the missionary, hesitating, stopped in the middle of a passage, the Maestro nodded his head encouragingly. "Go on; it's all right," he said, and he passed something that glittered upon the ring-finger of the girl. "Whom God hath united let no man part," said the missionary. He closed his book, stepped forward, and kissed the girl on the forehead. "That was well done," said the Maestro. And he also kissed the girl, but not on the forehead. They stood together for a while, speaking in absent-minded tones, the missionary of his missions, the Maestro of his schools, and then the Maestro and the girl started on again toward Bago. But Huston did not mount right away. He stood looking at them as they walked along the road, side by side, as they were to be through life, the dog frisking gleefully at their heels. They came to a turn in the highway and with a sudden joyous skip they vanished behind the cane, hand in hand like children. Huston rose slowly into his saddle. "Come on, little horse," he said kindly; "come on; we're not in this." IX CAYBIGAN When Sergeant Blount's detachment marched into San Juan, and in the centre of the plaza grounded arms with a crash that ran along the stone flagging in vibrating menace, the little pueblo cowered in a completeness of fear and abject surrender never reached before. Like lizards a few brown beings here and there slid out of sight; and the big blue-shirted men, grouped there beneath the white sunlight, found themselves as in a vacuum of heat and silence. But they had an uneasy sensation of eyes, eyes timorous and hostile, shifting and malevolent, from behind closed shutters and torn nipa walls peering upon them in tremulous distrust. In her stall at the head of the street, Eustefania, hundred-year-old, wrinkled, black, toothless, was hastily gathering up her store--two mangoes, a cluster of bananas, a dozen rice cakes, five twine-wrapped cheroots--into her pañuelo with trembling hands. And Pedro Lasco, crouching upon the stone steps of the church, a cigarette between his fingers, found his simple and complex soul filled with a new and inexplicable tumult.