for the time being and sufficed, since they knew their stay would be short.

"We should best wear our hats on the train," remarked Mrs. Beltrán before they started. "I am not Spanish enough to don a mantilla or to wear merely a veil upon every occasion."

"Oh, you dear Englishy mother," cried Anita. "Well, as I am half English I will follow the custom half the time." She settled her hat upon her curly head saying: "There, I look like any American girl, for I have completely un-Spanished myself, and with my stately mother will be recognized anywhere as an Inglesa. What do we do when we get to the town?"

"We shall be met by your father's cousin, Doña Benilda. She is to guide us to the village."

"As she is my cousin, too, I hope I shall like her," remarked Anita as they started forth.

The tinkle of a bell, the call of "Señores viajeres para Santander al tren" and the train, upon which Anita and her mother had been travelling, glided off, leaving them upon the platform looking curiously around. How, among the many black clad women, were they to distinguish Doña Benilda? Peasant women with little shawls across their shoulders or folded over their heads trudged off with baskets; girls, daintily shod, with hair carefully arranged, chattered in groups, workmen in blue jeans moved with deliberation about the platform. Presently a middle-aged, dark-eyed little woman, enveloped from head to foot in a black veil, and followed by a little maid, came up to the strangers. "Doña Catalina and Señorita Anita, my cousins, without doubt," she said in Spanish.

"And our cousin Doña Benilda," replied Mrs. Beltrán in the same tongue. "But how did you know us so readily?"

"Oh, the hats, the hats," returned Doña Benilda, smiling. Then she kissed them on each cheek, summoned the little maid to carry their bags and they started up the street of the quaint and pretty town, mountains on one side, the great Cantabric Sea on the other. Now that the tide was coming in it rose in certain streets, lapping against the sides of ancient houses whose small slits of windows had looked out for centuries upon the incoming or outgoing flood. The little market place was lively with shoppers, while from the grim, gray old church issued a throng of black-robed women, mantillas on heads and missals in hands.

Before the door of one of the fairly modern apartment houses the party paused to mount many stairs and at last to 

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