“I’d rather be a hermit and have smallpox than bother forever as she does, according to Mrs. Rothe; and flatter men—not I! But I think I should be more feminine and difficult.” Her hands trembled a little as she burnished her hair, and once her eyes filled with tears; but she brushed them off with a scowl, and still refused to think. She had been too much with Over, and their friendship had run too smoothly for her thoughts to have been tempted to revolve about him when alone. There were times when she turned cold and then hot if he came upon her suddenly, and his touch and glance had thrilled her more than once. But she had kept it steadily before her that this was but a summer friendship and that in a short time she would be in California and he in England. It is true that her imagination supplemented the separation with a meeting in one country or the other not later than a year hence, but she had not permitted her mind to dwell upon the significance of his audible self-analysis in Madrid, holding that when a man doubted the depth of his sentiments the time had not come to take him seriously. Moreover, to speculate upon the significance of a man’s attentions was not only indelicate but put her in the class with other girls, and nothing distressed her more than to approach the average. Therefore, had she never sought to discover what lay beneath her daily pleasure in Over’s society and her matter-of-fact assumption that for the time he was hers. Nor would she permit herself to analyze her sense of disappointment to-night. Her soul had been floating on the high, golden notes of the nightingales, and not alone; it had plunged down with a velocity that left it sick and dizzy, but as Catalina banged the large pins into her hair she still refused to demand the reason. The people were talking in the garden. She shut her window overlooking it and sat down before the one opposite. The moon had not risen; the street, lit by a solitary lamp, was full of shadows. It was easy to convert the shadows into swarthy men with turbaned heads and flowing robes, but she was not in a historical mood. Even a man with a long Spanish cloak folded closely about him and holding manifestly to the heavier shadows failed to arrest her attention. In spite of her admirable self-control her mind wondered uneasily why Over did not call her, how he was occupied; for the time was passing. Her eyes wandered to the height behind the Albaicin. There were lights; they might be watch-fires. It was not so long ago that that turbulent quarter had rung with the clamor of battle, of civil strife, that its gates had been secretly opened to Boabdil in the night, and his father or uncle been defied to come over and redden its streets. What were four centuries?