Don Joaquin found this enigmatical, which Gore might or might not have intended that he should. Though wholly uncertain how Mariquita might regard him when she came to understand that he wished for more than friendship, he was by this time quite aware that her father approved; and he was particularly anxious that she should not be "bothered." Don Joaquin diplomatically hinted that Blaine might close with some other offer. "There is no other offer. He told me so quite straightforwardly. I have the refusal. If he does get another offer, and I have not decided, he is of course quite free to accept it. He does not want to hurry me; I expect he knows that if I did buy, he would get a better price from me than from anyone else." Gore might very reasonably be tired after his immensely long ride, and when he went off to bed Don Joaquin could not feel aggrieved. But he was hardly pleased by the idea that the young man intended to manage his own affairs without discussion of them, and to keep his own counsel. CHAPTER XIX. "Just you leave well alone," said Sarella, a little more didactically than Don Joaquin cared for. "Things are going as well as can be expected" (and here she laughed a little); "they're moving now." Don Joaquin urged his opinion that Mariquita ought to be enlightened as to his approval of her suitor. Sarella answered, with plain impatience, "If you tell her she has a suitor she _won't_ have one. Don't you pry her eyes open with your thumb; let them open of themselves." Don Joaquin only half understood this rhetoric, and he seldom liked what he could not understand. He adopted a slightly primitive measure in reprisal-- "It isn't," he remarked pregnantly, "as if the young man were not a Catholic--I would not allow her to marry him if he were not." "No?" And it was quite clear to Don Joaquin that he had killed two birds with one stone; he saw that Sarella was both interested and impressed. "Catholics should marry Catholics," he declared with decision. "You didn't think so always," Sarella observed, smiling. "If I forgot it, I suffered for it," her elderly admirer retorted. Sarella was puzzled. She naturally had not the remotest suspicion that he had felt his wife's early death as a reprisal on the part of Heaven. She knew little of her aunt, and less of that aunt's married life. Had there been quarrels about religion? "Well, I daresay you may be right," she said gravely. "Two religions in one house may lead to awkwardness." "Yes. That is so," he agreed, with a completeness of conviction that considerably enlightened her. "And after all," she went on, smiling with great sweetness, "they're only two branches of the same religion." This was her way of hinting that the little bird he had married would have been wise to hop from her own religious twig to his. This suggestion, however, Don Joaquin utterly repudiated.