"There was no necessity. It might have been out of place. All the same it is true what I say." "But I think it is also true that to be a nun is the best way for some women." "Naturally. For some." Mariquita had no sort of desire to argue with him, or anyone; arguments were, she thought, almost quarrels. He, on his side, was again thinking of Sarella, and left the nuns alone. "It would," he said, "be a good thing if Sarella should become Catholic. If she talks about religion you can explain to her that there can be only one that is true." Mariquita did not understand (though everyone else did) that her father wished to marry Sarella, and, of course, she could not know that he was resolved against provoking further punishment by marrying a Protestant. "If I can," she said, slowly, "I will try to help her to see that. She does not talk much about such things. And she is much older than I am--" "Oh, yes; quite very much older," he agreed earnestly, though in fact Sarella appeared simply a girl to him. "And it would not do good for me to seem interfering." "But," he agreed with some adroitness, "though a blind person were older than you (who can see) you would show her the way?" Mariquita was not, at any rate, so blind as to be unable to see that her father was strongly desirous that Sarella should be a Catholic. It had surprised her, as she had no recollection of his having troubled himself concerning her own mother, his beloved wife, not having been one. Of course, she was glad, thinking it meant a deeper interest in religion on his own part. CHAPTER IX. Between Mariquita and her father there was little in common except a partial community of race; in nature and character they were entirely different. In her the Indian strain had only physical expression, and that only in the slim suppleness of her frame; she would never grow stout as do so many Spanish women. Whereas in her father the Indian blood had effects of character. He was not merely subtle like a Latin, but had besides the craft and cunning of an Indian. Yet the cunning seemed only an intensification of the subtlety, a deeper degree of the same quality and not an added separate quality. In fact, in him, as in many with the same mixture of race, the Indian strain and the Spanish were really mingled, not merely joined in one individual. Mariquita had, after all, only one quarter Spanish, and one Indian; whereas with him it was a quarter of half and half. She had, in actual blood, a whole half that was pure Saxon, for her mother's New England family was of pure English descent. Yet Mariquita seemed far more purely Spanish than her father; he himself could trace nothing of her mother in her, and in her character was nothing Indian but her patience. From her mother personally she inherited nothing, but through her mother she had certain characteristics that helped to make her very incomprehensible to Don Joaquin, though he did not know it.