find themselves in Doña Benilda's high-up rooms where the guests were welcomed with much ceremony; the house was theirs, they were told. From the balcony swung vines and gay flowering plants; a bird chirped in a gilded cage by a curtained window; there were many rooms, many mirrors, few pictures, a large and ornate representation of the Virgin of Covadonga the most prized. The sala, arranged after the regulation style of that part of the country, showed a bent-wood sofa with three chairs ranged at each end in regular order and facing one another. One or two old cabinets, an antique chest, a high antique refectory table, finely carved, completed the furniture. From the windows of one of the rooms one beheld the range of mountains fading off into the clouds; on the other side sparkled the sea. The long sea wall, time-worn, small-eaved stone houses, a distant church perched upon a hill, peeped out from the green of trees, and farther off the white houses of a village showed themselves enclosed in thick embowerage.

Anita had a strange feeling of association with it all. The home of her ancestors it was which Doña Benilda pointed out to her, the church where her father was baptized and the distant village where he was born. "Cuesta is the name," Doña Benilda told her. "We go there to-morrow."

Though understanding something of the talk Anita was obliged to turn frequently to her mother to interpret.

"My daughter has not yet become very proficient in her father's language," Mrs. Beltrán explained. "She can speak a little, read more, but it is another thing to understand what is said to her."

Doña Benilda replied animatedly. "When comes in my son Rodrigo, he will speak in the English," she said with pride. "At once he will come," she added as she led them to their rooms. Exquisitely embroidered linen, wonderful counterpanes, blankets of the finest covered the beds, but beyond this the rooms displayed very simple furnishing.

Before long appeared Don Rodrigo, a funny looking little man who might have been of any age. He was small, dark, lean. His hair was black and bushy, his small moustache carefully waxed and turned up at the ends. With arms too short and head too big for his body, Anita told herself that he looked exactly like a boy doll. He advanced on high heels, bent low before her mother, kissed her hand and said that he kissed her feet. Before Anita he paused a moment as if wondering if he might take the cousinly privilege of kissing her upon either cheek, but observing that she gave no encouragement to this sort of 

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