He had taken Jane, however, not only on this voyage, but on that preceding it, which had been to Rio. It was Captain Lote's belief, and his wife's hope, that a succession of sea winds might blow away recollections of Senor Speranza--“fan the garlic out of her head,” as the captain inelegantly expressed it. Jane had spent her sixteenth and seventeenth years at a school for girls near Boston. The opera company of which Speranza was a member was performing at one of the minor theaters. A party of the school girls, duly chaperoned and faculty-guarded, of course, attended a series of matinees. At these matinees Jane first saw her hero, brave in doublet and hose, and braver still in melody and romance. She and her mates looked and listened and worshiped from afar, as is the habit of maidenly youth under such circumstances. There is no particular danger in such worship provided the worshiper remains always at a safely remote distance from the idol. But in Jane's case this safety-bar was removed by Fate. The wife of a friend of her father's, the friend being a Boston merchant named Cole with whom Captain Zelotes had had business dealings for many years, was a music lover. She was in the habit of giving what she was pleased to call “musical teas” at her home. Jane, to whom Mr. and Mrs. Cole had taken a marked fancy, was often invited to those teas and, because the Coles were “among our nicest people,” she was permitted by the school authorities to attend. At one of those teas Senor Miguel Carlos Speranza was the brightest star. The Senor, then in his twenty-ninth year, handsome, talented and picturesque, shone refulgent. Other and far more experienced feminine hearts than Jane Snow's were flutteringly disturbed by the glory of his rays. Jane and he met, they shook hands, they conversed. And at subsequent teas they met again, for Speranza, on his part, was strongly attracted to the simple, unaffected Cape Cod schoolgirl. It was not her beauty alone--though beauty she had and of an unusual type--it was something else, a personality which attracted all who met her. The handsome Spaniard had had many love affairs of a more or less perfunctory kind, but here was something different, something he had not known. He began by exerting his powers of fascination in a lazy, careless way. To his astonishment the said powers were not overwhelming. If Jane was fascinated she was not conquered. She remained sweet, simple, direct, charmingly aloof. And Speranza was at first puzzled, then piqued, then himself madly fascinated. He wrote fervid letters, he begged for interviews, he haunted each one of Mrs. Cole's “teas.” And, at last, he wrung from Jane a confession of her love, her promise to marry him. And that very week Miss Donaldson, the head of the school, discovered and read a package of the Senor's letters to her pupil.