So he and Mariquita thenceforth called her "Sarella." CHAPTER V. Don Joaquin never thought much of Robert Gore; he failed, from the first, to "take to him." It had not delighted him that "Sarella" should arrive under his escort, though how she could have made her way up from Maxwell without him, he did not trouble to discuss with himself. At first he had thought it almost inevitable that the young man should make those services of his a claim to special intimacy with the lady to whom he had accidentally been useful. As it became apparent that Gore made no such claim, and was not peculiarly inclined to intimacy with his late fellow-traveller, Don Joaquin was half disposed to take umbrage, as though the young man were in a manner slighting Miss Jackson--his own wife's niece. As there were only two women about the place, indifference to one of them (and that one, in Don Joaquin's opinion, by far the more attractive) might be accounted for by some special inclination towards the other. Was Gore equally indifferent to Mariquita? Now, at present, Mariquita's father was not ready to approve any advances from the stranger in that direction. He did not feel he knew enough about him. That he was sufficiently well off, he thought probable; but in that matter he must have certainty. And besides, he thought Gore was sure to be a Protestant. Now he had married a Protestant himself: and that his wife had been taken from him in her youth had been, he had silently decided, Heaven's retribution. Besides, a girl was different. A man might do things she might not. _He_ had consulted his own will and pleasure only; but Mariquita was not therefore free to consult hers. A Catholic girl should give herself only to a Catholic man. That Mariquita and Gore saw little of each other he was pretty sure, but it was not possible they should see nothing. And it soon became his opinion that, without much personal intercourse, they were interested in each other. Mariquita listened (without often looking at him) when Gore talked, in a manner he had never yet observed in her. Gore's extreme deference towards the girl, his singular and almost aloof courtesy was, the old man conceived, not only breeding and good manners, but the sign of some special way in which she had impressed him; as if he had, at sight, perceived in her something unrevealed to her father himself. In this, as in most things, Don Joaquin was correct in his surmise. He was shrewd in surmise to the point almost of cleverness, though by no means an infallible judge of character. It did not, however, occur to him that the young stranger was right in this fancied perception, that in Mariquita there was something higher and finer than anything divined by her father, who had never gone beyond admitting that, so far, he had perceived in her nothing out of place.