Juanita slipped in among her schoolmates, and Sor
Teresa, looking straight in front of her, saw nothing.
Thisbe It was the custom in the convent school
on the Torrero-hill to receive visitors on Thursdays.
This festivity farther extended to the evening, when
the girls were allowed to walk for an hour in the garden
and talk. Talking, it must be remembered, as
an indulgence of the flesh, is considered in religious
communities to be a treat only permitted at certain
periods. It is, indeed, only by tying the tongue
that tyranny can hope to live.
“These promenades are not without use,”
the Mother Superior once said to Evasio Mon, one of
the lay directors of this school. “One discovers
what friendships have been formed.”
But the Mother Superior, like many cunning persons,
was wrong. For a schoolgirl’s friendship
is like the seed of grass, blown hither and thither;
while only one or two of a sowing take root in some
hidden corner and grow.
Juanita’s bosom friend of the red hair had recovered
her lost position. Her hair was, in fact, golden
again. They were walking in the garden at sunset,
and waiting for the clock of San Fernando to strike
seven. Juanita had told her friend of the chocolates—all
soft inside—which were to come through
the hole in the wall; and the golden haired girl had
confided in Juanita that she had never loved her as
she did at that moment. Which was, perhaps, not
unnatural.
The garden of the convent school is large, and spreads
far down the slope of the hill. There are many
fruit-trees and a few cypress. Where the stream
runs there are bunches of waving bamboos, and at the
lower end, where the wall is broken, there is a little
grove of nut trees, where the nightingales sing.
“It must be seven; come, let us go slowly towards
the trees,” said Juanita. They both looked
round eagerly. There were two nuns in the gardens,
gravely walking side by side, casting demure and not
unkindly glances from time to time towards their gay
charges. Juanita and her friend had, as elder
girls, certain privileges, and were allowed to walk
apart from the rest. They were heiresses, moreover,
which makes a difference even in a convent school
that shuts the world out with forbidding gates.
Juanita bade her friend keep watch, and ran quickly
among the trees. The wall was old and overgrown
with wild roses and honeysuckle. She found the
hole, and, hastily turning back her sleeve, thrust
her arm through. Her hand came out through the
flowers with an inconsequent, childish flourish of
the fingers close by the grave face of Marcos.
He was essentially a man of his word; and she jerked
her hand away from his lips with a gay laugh.
“Marcos,” she said, “the packets
must be small or they will not come through.”
“I have had them made small on purpose,”
he said. But she seemed to have forgotten the
chocolates already, for her hand did not come back.
