coasting schooner for Key West, with four dollars and twenty five-cents in his pocket. Gracias knew nothing of the real cause of all this. Madam Ruiz, Manuel's broad-shouldered and martial-looking, but in reality sighingly gentle, sentimental step-mother, was not in his confidence with regard to Garda. But she would not have credited the story, even if she had been, for she firmly believed her handsome step-son to be invincible from the Everglades to the Altamaha. During the long, warm, mid-summer afternoons, when flat Patricio, low in the blue sea, had not a shadow, this lady, in her thick white house, the broad rooms darkened by the closed shutters, was in the habit of amusing herself with many romances about this; for your warm, still countries are ever the land of the storyteller. Madam Ruiz now and then told her stories to her husband. "Yes, yes," said that gentleman; "he inherits it all from me." He was partially paralyzed, and sat all day in his chair; he did not like to have Manuel about much, he envied him so. He took more comfort in the children of this second marriage--a flock of brown-skinned, chattering little girls, who would be sure to grow up dark, lovely, and gentle, with serene, affectionate eyes, and the sweetest voices in the world, in which to call him their "dearest papa." Adolfo Torres meanwhile kept his friend's secret punctiliously, as it was not to his credit; it was terribly against his credit to have gone as he did to Garda herself,--so Adolfo thought. As for Garda, she said, afterwards, that she did not mention it because it was so much trouble; she did not like to tell things, she was not a narrator (one of her mother's phrases); besides it was not interesting. The girl had a very decided idea about what was and what was not interesting. But she stopped there, she did not explain her idea to others; she had the air of not even explaining it to herself. CHAPTER XVI.