Barron took her advice and surveyed her mutely with dancing eyes. For a moment her lips, puckered into a tremulous pout, twitched with the premonitory symptoms of a second outburst. But she controlled them, moved by some perverse instinct of coquetry, while the laughter welled up in the eyes that were fixed on him. “I see I’ll have to make a joke,” he said, “and I can’t think of any.” “Mrs. Garcia’s got a book full. You might borrow it.” “Couldn’t you tell me one that’s made you laugh before and loan it to me?” “But it mightn’t work a second time. I might take it quite solemnly. A sense of humor’s a very capricious thing.” “I think the lady who’s got it is even more so,” he said. And then once again they laughed in concert, foolishly and gaily and without knowing why. They had gained the top of the hill, and the blaze of red that swept across the west shone on their faces. They were within a few minutes’ walk of the house now and they continued, arm in arm, as was the custom of the day, and at the same loitering gait. “Didn’t you tell me your people came originally from Eldorado County, somewhere up near Hangtown?” he asked. “I’ve just been up that way, and if I’d known the place I might have stopped there.” “Oh, you never could have found it,” said Mariposa hastily. “It was only a cabin miles back in the foothills. My mother often told me of it--just a cabin by a stream. It has probably disappeared now. My father and mother met and were married there among the mines, and--and--I was born there,” she ended, stammeringly, hating the lies upon which her youthful traditions had been built. “If I’d known you had been born there I’d have gone on a pilgrimage to find that cabin if it had taken a month.” “But I tell you it can’t be standing yet. I’m twenty-four years old--” she suddenly realized that this, too, was part of the necessary web of misstatement in which she was caught. The color deepened on her face into a conscious blush. She dropped her eyes, then raising them to his with a curious defiance, said: “No--that’s a mistake. I’m--I’m--more than that, I’m twenty-five, nearly twenty-six.” Barron, who saw nothing in the equivocation but a girl’s foolish desire to understate her age, burst into delighted laughter, and pressing the hand on his arm against his side, said: “Why, I always thought you were _years_ older than that--thirty to thirty-five at least.” And he looked with teasing eyes into her face. But this time Mariposa did not laugh, nor even smile. The joy had suddenly gone out of her, and she walked on in silence, her head drooped, seeming in some mysterious way to have grown suddenly anxious and preoccupied. “There’s the house,” she said at length. “I was getting tired.” “There’s a light in the parlor,” said Barron, as he opened the gate. “What can be the matter? Has Benito killed grandma, or is there a party?”