This time Magdalena's face turned almost purple; but she had neither her sex's quick instinct of self-protection nor its proneness to dissemble, secretive as she was. She lifted her head haughtily and turned away. For a moment she looked very Spanish, not the unfortunate result of coupled races that she was. Helena, who was in her naughtiest humour, threw back her head and laughed scornfully. "A caballero!" she cried: "who will serenade you at two o'clock in the morning when you are dying with sleep, and lie in a hammock smoking cigaritos all day; who will roll out rhetoric by the yard, and look like an idiot when you talk common-sense to him; who is too lazy to walk across the plaza, and too proud to work, and too silly to keep the Americans from grabbing all he's got. I met a few dilapidated specimens when I was in Los Angeles last year. One beauty with long hair, a sombrero, and a head about as big as my fist, used to serenade me in intervals of gambling until I appealed to Jack, and he threatened to have him put in the calaboose if he didn't let me alone--" Magdalena turned upon her. Her face was livid. Her eyes stared as if she had seen the dead walking. "Hush!" she said. "You--you cruel--you have everything--" Helena, whose intuitions never failed her, when she chose to exercise them, knew what she had done, caught a flashing glimpse of the shattered dreams of the girl who said so little, whose only happiness was in the ideal world she had built in the jealously guarded depths of her soul. "Oh, Magdalena, I'm so sorry," she stammered. "I was only joking. And my statesmen will probably be horrid old boors. I _know_ I'll never find one that comes up to my ideal." She burst into tears and flung her arms about Magdalena's neck: she was always miserable when those she loved were angry with her, much as she delighted to shock the misprized. "Say you forgive me," she sobbed, "or I sha'n't eat or sleep for a week." And Magdalena, who always took her mercurial friend literally, forgave her immediately and dried her tears. II