He went out and slammed the door, and directly she heard him tell Juan Castillas that he had married one of the wooden saints of the Mission come to life. "I am glad it is not one with the broken glass eyes and the missing fingers," laughed Juan. "Dona Raquel is the most beautiful woman in the Californias to-day." She turned from the window and looked at herself in the mirror. The most beautiful woman in the Californias! Was that so? Could it be? Yet what was beauty, after all, if-- Between herself and the glass another face seemed to arise,--the blue-eyed childish face for which she had been forgotten. "Holy Mother!" she moaned, and covered her own with her hands. "Of what use is beauty to a woman who is not beloved?" [Music: _El Tormento de Amor._] Tormento de amor, passion que devora, Tu marchi taste la fuente de mi vida. CHAPTER X "I wasted the holy water on the doorway of the sala and the bedroom," grumbled old Polonia, ensconced among the serapes on the carreta; "I should have kept it for the road to the sea. She rides away from him alone; but it is a witchcraft, all the same." Secretly the old woman gave sympathy to the handsome Rafael, who loved women of gaiety and fine clothes. The town was a very good place to stay, and the band played, and there was a good circus; and to choose instead a nasty old Mission where a cross priest scolded, and smoked, and drank himself stupid each dinner-time! What kind of a girl would go back there? Still, the old Indian knew that she was not of wood, like the statues in the old church, let the husband think as he might! Last night had proven she could be her mother's own child in a storm of passion. It was perhaps for the best that she did not love her husband so madly; for if he should ever prove untrue,--and men of course were so--what might not happen? She thought of the witchcraft of the mother, and crossed herself. The moon, the beautiful moon of the month of Mary! shone round and silvered in the blue above the mountains, as the blaze of the sun sank into the western sea. South lay the ranch of San Joaquin, and Raquel, for all her thirty-mile ride, was sorry. She would have no excuse to ride past; it was the one slight of the country to pass the house of an acquaintance, and this family was one deserving of honor. The soft dusk of warm lands had stretched over the level. The sweet clover along the road had a deeper note of perfume, and the patches of mustard bloom added its own spicy fragrance. Gladly she would have ridden on alone in the perfect night, but it would not do. She cared little for the herd of people, but she always tried to keep in mind what the Dona Luisa would have done in the little duties toward the opinion of the valley, and she had no idea of making a scandal, or of appearing to ride in secret from the town where her husband was still detained.