Sarella, listening, and knowing that the two men were looking at each other, smiled at her bangle, and softly shook the dangling heart to make the crystal give as diamond-like a glitter as possible. Gore's life, she thought, would come all right. She had done her best valorously for Mariquita; women, in her theory, behooved to do their best for each other against masculine tyrrany ("bossishness," she called it), but all the time she was half-savage, herself, with the girl for not being willing to be happy in so obviously comfortable a way as offered. It seemed to her "wasteful" that so pretty a girl should go and be a nun; if she had been "homely" like Sister Aquinas it would have been different. But Sarella had learned from Sister Aquinas that these matters were above her, and was quite content to accept them without understanding them. "Ever since I came here," Gore was saying, "I have lived in a dream of what life would be--if I could join hers with mine. It was only a dream, and I had to awake." Don Joaquin did not understand his mind, but he was able now to see that the young man suffered, and had received a blow that, somehow, _would_ change his life, and turn its course aside. "Anything," Gore said, in a very low, almost thankful tone, "is better than it would have been if I had changed my dream for a nightmare; it would have been that, if I had to think of myself as trying to pull her down, from her level to mine, of her as having been brought down. I meant to do her all possible good, all my life long. How can I wish to have done her the greatest harm? As it would have been if, out of fear or over-persuasion, she had been brought to call herself my wife who could be no man's wife." ("_How_ he loves her!" thought Sarella.) ("I doubt it has wrecked him a bit," thought Don Joaquin.) CHAPTER XXX. Mariquita awoke early to see Sarella entering her room, and it surprised her, for her cousin was not fond of leaving her bed betimes. "Oh, I'm going back to bed again," Sarella explained. "We were up to all hours. Of course, your father made a rumpus." Mariquita heard this with less surprise than concern. It really grieved her to displease him. "He has very queer old-fashioned notions," Sarella remarked, settling herself comfortably on Mariquita's bed, "and thinks it's his business to arrange all your affairs for you. Besides, you know by this time that any plan he has been hatching he expects to hatch out, and not to help him seems to him most undutiful and shocking." "But I _can't_ help him in this plan of his," Mariquita pleaded unhappily. "I suppose not. Well, he flared out, and I was glad you were in bed. Gore behaved very well. It's a thousand pities you can't like him." "But I do like him. I like him better than any man I ever knew." "Oh, yes! Better than the cowboys or the old chaplain at Loretto. _That's_ no good."