Even yet I dread to think of this strange child out of the sunshine. I would always have kept her under the influence of soothing warmth. Mariposilla--little butterfly--how well she idealized her name. Born of the sun and for the sun, no real butterfly ever rivaled her. Why could I not protect her passionate, capricious young heart, as the flowers enfold at night the dazzling, thoughtless beauties of a summer's day? Alas! destiny seemed kinder to the insect than to the child. Viewing in retrospect the girl's rapid and eventful development, I now remember vividly each incident in her little history. When she came into my life like a picturesque plaything, I failed to realize that she was other than a beautiful child. I was then totally ignorant from experience of the premature blooming of Spanish girls. From history I knew that they developed young; but history is easily forgotten. It was natural to expect Mariposilla to pursue the same pace that once upon a time I had taken myself. We are all miserable egotists, without realizing the weakness; and I fell at once into the fallacy of believing that all girls develop in the same way. Mariposilla was only sixteen, and at sixteen most girls are children. I recalled my own blushes, as I remembered drawing-room miseries to which I was at that age subjected. When my grown brothers insisted upon presenting me to college chums, I flew at my earliest opportunity from the ordeal, cheered by the thought of a toboggan slide with my nice boy beau. Yes, I had a boy beau, who was truly delightful. It was only when he went away to college that I ceased to care for him, and bestowed my smiles upon a new flame across the way, who was yet a boy. At sixteen I regarded men as formidable creatures, to be encountered when school days were over, and childhood had come to an end. When I heard later that my gay Freshman smoked! and was engaged to a young woman of his college town, six years his senior, I wondered how I had ever consented to sit upon a sled with such a monster. At sixteen my ideas of love were as vague as they were wholesome. In my young healthiness I doubted seriously if any girl ever died for love outside of a book. Thus recalling my own girlhood, I at first felt no misgivings in exposing Mariposilla to the apparently innocent attentions of Mr. Sidney Sanderson, especially as his mother and myself were always about. It seemed only sensible to believe that the Spanish child would receive real benefit from her new associations. I did not realize the narrow boundaries of her young life, nor did I then understand how she adored Americans, whom she regarded as models of refinement and wisdom. When the Doña Maria told me of her grandnephew's love for her daughter I felt it an outrage that so young a girl should have been spoken to about marriage.