blush but a hot flame that passed over Esclavita’s face.
“I—I couldn’t find a place,” she answered, in choking accents. “And then, as everybody there knows me, I was ashamed.”
Doña Aurora Pardiñas reflected for some two minutes, and speaking gently to soften the harshness of the words:{63}
{63}
“Let us see,” she said. “You can refer only to the Señoritas de Romera who—knew nothing about you before you went to their house. Isn’t it so? It would be well, then,—you will see that yourself,—if you could find some one here who knew you at home who would recommend you.”
The girl hesitated for an instant, and then said:
“The Señorito Gabriel Pardo de la Lage and his sister know who I am.”
“Rita Pardo? The wife of the engineer? I am very well acquainted with her. And you say that she knows you?”
The girl answered by raising her hand and shrugging her shoulders as much as to say, “Why, ever since I was born!”
“Well, child,” rejoined Señora Pardiñas, frankly, “I am sorry that you should leave the Romeras. You could{64} not find a better house or better ladies.”
{64}
“I do not deny that,” replied Esclavita with greater emphasis than before, if possible; “only that I have told you the truth, Señora, as if I were talking to my dead mother or to the confessor. I was seized with homesickness, and if I hadn’t left them I think I should have lost my reason or have gone straight to my grave. I couldn’t eat. I would go off by myself to a corner to think. I grew paler and paler every day, and so thin that my clothes hung loose on me. At night I had fits of choking, as if some one was tightening a rope about my neck. But in spite of all that I was loth to say anything to the Señoritas. They saw it themselves, though, and they were the first to advise me, if I did not go back home, to look for a place with some family from there! ‘Child, you are so altered that you{65} don’t look like the same person,’ were the very words they used.”
{65}
As she said this, Esclavita’s chin trembled like a child’s when it is making an effort to keep from bursting into sobs. Her eyes could not be seen, as she had cast them
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