Padre Andros was frightened when he saw the effect of his recital. Dona Maria was not so stout as most of the women of the mixed races; but as he saw the dark color mount luridly to her face, and her eyes look almost bloodshot with sudden fury, he set down the glass of whiskey to cross himself, and dropped an ace in his perturbation. "For the love of God! senora," he exclaimed; and then it was Angela entered the room and found her cousin's wife ill with a fury she durst express only in prayers and maledictions against this girl brought to San Juan by Dona Luisa to ruin them all! Only fragments of the cause of her fury reached Angela, despite all her sudden sympathetic interest in the wife of her cousin, to whom she had heretofore been rather indifferent. But she pieced the fragments together, and as she told them to Bryton he could, with his own knowledge of the early racial mixtures in the land, get a very fair idea of the situation. The girl from Mexico had dared open the closet of a forgotten skeleton. "Of course she rules Rafael just now, to a certain extent," conceded Angela, carelessly. "He sees the Church and half the town at her feet here; she is a novelty, and he sees everyone turn to look at her. But at San Juan she will find no one at her feet, and her churchmen will be far enough away. The padre there detests her; she stopped him from selling bricks from the cloister pillars." "The padre and Dona Maria should make a strong team," observed Bryton. "The woman need be strong to win against them--is she?" "How do I know? I've never spoken to her. She has nasty eyes. That's all I can remember of her." "Nasty?" "Oh, it is the expression. I saw them once, and she made me nervous. Perhaps it was because she divined that I was one of the 'accursed heretics.' I understand that is the way the lower order speak of Protestants!" "But she cannot be quite of the lower order, can she? Her father was of the best Spanish and American blood ever joined on this coast, far above the Arteagas." "Oh! So you also look up pedigrees here; I wonder why." "It is a country where you hear of them without question," he returned, indifferently. "The people are always sparring among themselves and referring to their ancestors--if they dare. Dona Luisa was a pure-blood Spanish woman, but the Arteagas had a bad Indian and Mexican streak. She saw it develop in her own children, and it gave her a bad fright. She counted on this marriage bringing the last of them back to the old conservative manner of life." "Ah!" She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously; "but you forget that Raquel, the present Senora Arteaga, has also a Mexican streak."