Of course I said nothing of this to my companion. Indeed, when she spoke to me I did not hear her. My thoughts had flown far from the burgher's daughter sitting by me, and were with my grandmother's people. I saw, in imagination, the uplands of Old Castile, as I had often heard them described, hot in summer and bleak in winter. I pictured the dark, frowning walls of Toledo, with its hundred Moorish trophies, the castles that crowned the hills around, the gray olive groves, and the box-clad slopes. I saw Palencia, where my grandmother, Petronilla de Vargas, was born; Palencia, dry and brown and sun-baked, lying squat and low on its plain, the eaves of its cathedral a man's height from the ground. All this I saw. I suppose the Spanish blood in me awoke and asserted itself at sight of those other Spaniards. And then--then I forgot it all as I heard behind me an alien voice, and I turned and found Dymphna had stolen from me and was talking to a stranger. CHAPTER IX. PLAYING WITH FIRE. He was a young man, and a Dutchman, but not a Dutchman of the stout, burly type which I had most commonly seen in the country. He had, it is true, the usual fair hair and blue eyes, and he was rather short than tall; but his figure was thin and meager, and he had a pointed nose and chin, and a scanty fair beard. I took him to be nearsighted: at a second glance I saw that he was angry. He was talking fast to Dymphna--of course in Dutch--and my first impulse, in face of his excited gestures and queer appearance, was to laugh. But I had a notion what his relationship to the girl was, and I smothered this, and instead asked, as soon as I could get a word in, whether I should leave them. "Oh, no!" Dymphna answered, blushing slightly, and turning to me with a troubled glance. I believe she had clean forgotten my presence. "This is Master Jan Van Tree, a good friend of ours. And this," she continued, still in Spanish, but speaking to him, "is Master Carey, one of my father's guests." We bowed, he formally, for he had not recovered his temper, and I--I dare say I still had my Spanish ancestors in my head--with condescension. We disliked one another at sight, I think. I dubbed him a mean little fellow, a trader, a peddler; and, however he classed me, it was not favorably. So it was no particular desire to please him which led me to say with outward solicitude, "I fear you are annoyed at something, Master Van Tree?" "I am!" he said bluntly, meeting me half-way. "And am I to know the cause?" I asked, "or is it a secret?" "It is no secret!" he retorted. "Mistress Lindstrom should have been more careful. She should not have exposed herself to the chance of being seen by those miserable foreigners." "The foreigners--in the boat?" I said dryly.