Rafael had manfully chosen to stay by Tia Marta and, when the others came out, the little fellow was having his hands full with the two donkeys and the two mules left in his charge, while Capitana, who, jealous of Coronela’s honors, had been vixenish from the start, was backing into a pottery shop and threatening with destruction a whole floorful of ruddy water-pitchers, green-glazed pots, buff plates and amber pipkins. Pedrillo sprang to her bridle and dragged her out again before she had done more damage than crush that unlucky umbrella against the lintel, so that rivulets of green and scarlet trickled freely over Tia Marta’s face, which still, despite this gallant rescue, had not the least flicker of a smile for poor Pedrillo. And so it was day after day as the mule-train, leaving behind luxuriant Andalusia, crept across the rolling pasture lands of Estremadura, Don Quixote’s province, and the sunburnt steppes of Castile. Tia Marta regarded Pedrillo no more than if he were one of the infrequent figures they met on those lonely plains,--an elf-haired shepherd clad in the woolly skins of his own sheep, an old crone with a basket of turnips on her head, a milkmaid balancing on either shoulder a jar wrapped in leaves, a bare-legged peasant with a gaudy handkerchief twisted about his forehead and streaming down the back of his neck. To these she would, indeed, say “Good day” or “God be with you,” in response to the grave courtesy of their Castilian greetings, but Pedrillo might as well have been a gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral for all the heed she paid to his hangdog blandishments.