Mrs. Moulton was so far the reverse of a cruel and vicious woman that she had been, for the good of her soul, too amiable and self-sacrificing for at least thirty years of her life. Not fine enough to have developed loveliness of character, there had, perhaps, been too few opportunities for reaction, or, if occurring, they had been conscientiously stifled. A good woman, but not of the most distinguished fibre, the effacement of self for the few she loved had been but a higher order of selfishness, and when for the first time in her life a positive hatred possessed her it found her without that greatness which ignores and foregoes revenge. Catalina, it must be confessed, would have tried the patience of far more saintly characters than Mrs. Moulton, and when to a natural antipathy was added the daily jarring of long-tried nerves the wonder was that the crisis did not come sooner. But Mrs. Moulton was accustomed to self-control and to the exercise of the average amount of Christianity. Moreover, she had her standards of conduct, and held all exhibitions of feeling to be vulgar. Therefore, in spite of her growing and morbid desire to humble Catalina, she might have forborne to force an issue, and perhaps, had circumstances favored the alien, have grimly, however unwillingly, triumphed once more over self. But these last days had unravelled her nerves. To passionate sympathy for her pale and persecuted daughter, misled in the first instance by the daily example of a barbarian, had recently been added a night of hideous discomfort, when, not one of the four speaking a language but their useless own, and without the invaluable Baedeker, they had fled from a ridiculous peasant, changing trains at midnight, waiting hours at way-stations, arriving at Toledo in the gray, cold dawn, hungry, worried, exhausted, to find neither omnibus nor cab at the station. As Mrs. Moulton toiled up the steep road through the carven gates of terrible and romantic memory, she had heartily wished that modern enterprise had blown up the rock with dynamite or run an elevator from the Tagus. It was then that her hatred of Catalina—who at least with her knowledge of foreign languages had been an acceptable courier—became an obsession, and she could have shrieked it out like any common virago. The emotional wave had receded, but left a dark and poisonous deposit behind.