"Is this," inquired the blonde lady--pointing, though inaccurately, as if to indicate Mariquita's home, "where Mr. Xeres lives, please?" She pronounced the X like the x's in Artaxerxes. "Certainly. He is my father." "Then your mother is my Aunt Margaret," said the lady in the smart clothes that looked so queer on an equestrian. "My mother unfortunately is dead," Mariquita informed her, with a simplicity that made the wide-open blue eyes open wider still, and caused their owner to decide that the girl was "awfully Spanish." Miss Sarah Jackson assumed (with admirable readiness) an expression of pathos. "How very sad! I do apologize," she murmured, as if the decease of her aunt were partly her fault. The young man was amused--not for the first time--by his fellow-traveller: but he did not show it. "You couldn't help it," said Mariquita. ("How very Spanish!" thought her cousin.) "Of course you did not know," the girl added, "or you would not have said anything to hurt me. And my mother's death happened five years ago." "Not _really_!" cried the deceased lady's niece. "How wholly unexpected!" "It wasn't very sudden," Mariquita explained. "She was ill for three months." "My father was quite unaware of it--entirely so. He died, in fact, just about that time. And Aunt Margaret and he were (so unfortunately!) hardly on terms. Personally I always (though a child) had the strongest affection for Aunt Margaret. I took her part about her marriage. Papa's _own_ second marriage struck me as less defensible." "_My_ father only married once," said Mariquita; "he is a widower." "Oh, quite so! I wish mine had remained so. My stepmother--but we all have our faults, no doubt. We did _not_ live agreeably after her third marriage--" (Mariquita was getting giddy, and so, perhaps, was Miss Jackson's fellow-traveller.) "I could not, in fact, live," that lady serenely continued, with a smile of lingering sweetness, "and finally we differed completely. (Not noisily, on my part, nor roughly but irrevocably.) Hence my resolve to turn to Aunt Margaret, and my presence here--blood _is_ thicker than water, when you come to think of it." "I met Miss Jackson at ----," her fellow-traveller explained, "and we made acquaintance--" "Introduced by Mrs. Plosher," Miss Jackson put in again with singular sweetness. "Mrs. Plosher's boarding-house was recommended to me by two ministers. Mr. Gore was likewise her guest, and coming, as she was aware, to your father's." Don Joaquin, besides the regular cowboys, had from time to time taken a sort of pupil or apprentice, who paid instead of being paid. Mariquita had not been informed that this Mr. Gore was expected. "So," Mr. Gore added, "I begged Miss Jackson to use one of my horses, and I have been her escort." "So coincidental!" observed that lady, shaking her head slightly. "Though really--now I find my aunt no longer presiding here--I _really_----" CHAPTER IV.