This was an old subject of discourse at the Garcia table, Mariposa continually refusing the young man’s invitations to let him hear and pass judgment upon her voice. Since he had met her he had heard further details of the recital at the opera-house and the opinion of Lepine, and was openly ambitious to have Mariposa for a pupil. Now she looked up at him with a sudden spark of animation in her eyes. “I will some day. I’ll come in some afternoon and sing for you--some afternoon when I have no headache,” she added hastily, seeing the prospect of urging in his eyes. Barron, sitting opposite, had been watching her covertly through the meal. He saw that she ate nothing, and guessed that the headache she pleaded was the result of a wakeful night. The evening before, when he had gone in to see the little boys in bed, he had casually asked them if they had been playing games that afternoon in which shouting had been a prominent feature. “Indians?” Benito had suggested, sitting up in his cot and scratching the back of his neck; “that’s a hollering game.” “Any game with screams. When I came in I thought I heard shouts coming from somewhere.” “That wasn’t us,” said Miguel from his larger bed in the corner. “We was playing burying soldiers in the back yard, and that’s a game where you bury soldiers, cut out of the papers, in the sandy place. There’s no sorter hollering in it. Sometimes we play we’re crying, but that’s quiet.” “P’raps,” said Benito sleepily, “it was Miss Moreau’s gentleman in the parlor. I let him in. They might have been singing. Now tell us the story about the Indians and the pony express.” This was all the satisfaction he got from the boys. After the story was told he did not go downstairs, but went into his own room and sat by his littered table, thinking. The details of his entrance into the house a few hours before were engraved on his mind’s eye. By the uncertain gaslight he saw the dark face of the stranger, with its slightly insolent droop of eyelid and non-committal line of clean-shaven lip. It was to his idea a disagreeable face. The simple man in him read through its shield of reserve to the complexities beneath. The healthily frank American saw in it the intricate sophistication of older civilizations, of vast communities where “God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.”