Chonita smiled kindly, but she was listening to her brother, who was now expatiating upon his wrongs to a sympathetic audience. "Holy heaven!" he exclaimed, striding up and down the room, "that an Iturbi y Moncada, the descendant of twenty generations, should be put to shame, to disgrace and humiliation, by being cast into a common prison! That an ardent patriot, a loyal subject of Mexico, should be accused of conspiring against the judgment of an Alvarado! Carillo was my friend, and had his cause been a just one I had gone with him to the gates of death or the chair of state. But could I, _I_, conspire against a wise and great man like Juan Bautista Alvarado? No! not even if Carillo had asked me so to do. But, by the stars of heaven, he did not. I had been but the guest of his bounty for a month; and the suspicious rascals who spied upon us, the poor brains who compose the Departmental Junta, took it for granted that an Iturbi y Moncada could not be blind to Carillo's plots and plans and intrigues, that, having been the intimate of his house and table, I must perforce aid and abet whatever schemes engrossed him. Ay, more often than frequently did a dark surmise cross my mind, but I brushed it aside as one does the prompting of evil desires. I would not believe that a Carillo would plot, conspire, and rise again, after the terrible lesson he had received in 1838. Alvarado holds California to his heart; Castro, the Mars of the nineteenth century, hovers menacingly on the horizon. Who, who, in sober reason, would defy that brace of frowning gods?" His eloquence was cut short by respiratory interference, but he continued to stride from one end of the room to the other, his face flushed with excitement. Prudencia's large eyes followed him, admiration paralyzing her tongue. Doña Trinidad smiled upward with the self-approval of the modest barn-yard lady who has raised a magnificent bantam. Don Guillermo applauded loudly. Only Chonita turned away, the truth smiting her for the first time. "Words! words!" she thought, bitterly. "_He_ would have said all that in two sentences. Is it true--_ay, triste de mi!_--what he said of my brother? I hate him, yet his brain has cut mine and wedged there. My head bows to him, even while all the Iturbi y Moncada in me arises to curse him. But my brother! my brother! he is so much younger. And if he had had the same advantages--those years in Mexico and America and Europe--would he not know as much as Diego Estenega? Oh, sure! sure!" "My son," Don Guillermo was saying, "God be thanked that thou didst not merit thy imprisonment. I should have beaten thee with my cane and locked thee in thy room for a month hadst thou disgraced my name. But, as it happily is, thou must have compensation for unjust treatment.--Prudencia, give me thy hand."