"You think of it as all past, that curse?" he demanded, threateningly. "Well, you think so! Priests have gone mad there, though the Church keeps it quiet. Since the year Don Eduardo and Dona Maria bought it, what has happened? All their land is slipping away. To-day she is building an adobe on the old Mission ranch, to hold one hundred and sixty acres in case they lose all the rest of their thirty miles of ranches. Two of her sons have been killed in the streets--one by a woman. All that remains is slipping slowly through their fingers. It is like a handful of wheat: the closer they try to hold it, the less they have in their hands. All they try is of no use. When they first bought those old walls of the Mission at Pico's auction, they were masters of the land, but what of that?" "If it is a curse, they earned it by tearing down the temple consecrated to God, that is all!" "All? Miguel, my brother, blew down no walls; he did no harm to anything at all. He only bought an interest in the Mission lands, and claimed some living-rooms as his share, and he is struck like the others by the curse, and does not die in his bed either, but is trampled into the earth until no one can see him!" "But that may be the other curse working--the curse on the Arteagas. You people seem to have earned a great many! Is it not time some of the family should try to live for blessings?" He did not answer, only stared at her with angry eyes and lips twitching in wrath he could not express. She looked at him an instant, and stretched out her arms wearily. All the glorious world of love about them, yet never aught of harmony in their two lives linked together. She had never seen the life domestic of young people. She did not know what it might mean to other women, but there were days when she grew sick with the dread of future years, the endless prison of her vow, the-- Suddenly she turned to him with a little gesture of appeal, almost tremulous. It was such weary work to battle constantly; and his mother-- "Rafael," she said, gently, "the blessings are in the world somewhere--shall not we try to find them? The old lives of the maledictions are gone. Ours is the new life, and we have done no wrong to expiate. And it may be, if we live as--as your mother would have wanted us to live, that the saints--" "To the bottom of the sea with your saints!" he broke in, angrily. "Por Dios! you are always dragging the dead out of their graves to make the days like a funeral. I prefer most the picnic in the hills, and I go to-day." "So do I," she answered; "but it will be to the hills of the south by the sea. To-night the moon shines, and the ride will be better than a picnic of your political friends." "By--" "It is no sort of use for you to make empty oaths, Rafael. I leave this town to-day; with you if you are wise, without you if you are not. But I myself--I go!"