"You should not have done this," she said in a rapid whisper. "How did you find me? How did you come here?" Her voice was kind, but steady. Cartaret stood still. This he had not looked for. His cheeks were flushed, and the lines about his mouth deepened, as they always did at moments of crisis, and made his face very firm. "Does it matter how?" he asked. "Not all the width of the world could have kept me away. There's something I've got to know and know instantly." "But you should not have come, and you must go immediately! Listen--no, listen to me now! I am not Vitoria Urola in these mountains; whether I want it or not, I have to be the Doña Dolorez Ethenard-Eskurola. That would perhaps sound amusing in the rue du Val de Grâce; here it is a serious matter: the most serious matter in this little mountain-world. You will have to listen to me." Cartaret folded his arms. "Go on," he said. "Last Winter," she continued, her face challenging his, "I had a time of rebellion against all these things amongst which I had been brought up. I had never been farther away from this place than Alegria, but I had had French and English governesses, and I read books and dreamed dreams. I loved to paint; I thought that I could learn to be a real artist, but I knew that my brother would think that a shame in an Eskurola and would never permit his unmarried sister to go to a foreign city to study. Nevertheless, I was hungry for the great world outside--for the real world--and so I took poor Chitta, gathered what jewels were my own and not family-jewels, and ran away." She looked from the window to the road that led into the valley; but the road was still deserted. "Chitta sold the jewels," she presently went on. "They brought very little; but to me, who had never used money, it seemed much. We went to Paris: I and Chitta, who, because she had often been so far as Vitoria before, became as much my guardian as she was my servant--and I was long afraid to go but a little distance in the streets without her: the streets terrified me, and, after one fright, she made me promise to go nowhere without her. So we took the room that you know of. We were used to regarding my brother as all-powerful; we feared that he would find us. Therefore, we would let no one know who we were or whence we came. Now that is over." Her voice trembled a little. She made a hopeless gesture. "It is all over, and we have come back to our own people." She raised her head proudly; she had regained her self-control: to Cartaret, she seemed to have regained an ancient pride. "I have learned that I must be what I was born to be." He squared his jaw. "A slave to your brother's will," he said. "A creature," she answered with steady gaze--"a creature of the will of God."