the doubtful simplicity of that married ingenue Mrs. Brimmer, although she still met the young girl’s advances with a certain reserve.  She found herself often pained by the practical brusqueness with which Mrs. Markham put aside the Comandante’s delicate attentions, and she was moved with a strange pity for his childlike trustfulness, which she knew was hopeless.  As the months passed, on the few occasions that she still met the Excelsior’s passengers she was surprised to find how they had faded from her memory, and to discover in them the existence of qualities that made her wonder how she could have ever been familiar with them.  She reproached herself with this fickleness; she wondered if she would have felt thus if they had completed their voyage to San Francisco together; and she recalled, with a sad smile, the enthusiastic plans they had formed during the passage to perpetuate their fellowship by anniversaries and festivals.  But she, at last, succumbed, and finally accepted their open alienation as preferable to the growing awkwardness of their chance encounters.

For a few weeks following the flight of Captain Bunker and her acceptance of the hospitality and protection of the Council, she became despondent.  The courage that had sustained her, and the energy she had shown in the first days of their abandonment, suddenly gave way, for no apparent reason.  She bitterly regretted the brother whom she scarcely remembered; she imagined his suspense and anguish on her account, and suffered for both; she felt the dumb pain of homesickness for a home she had never known.  Her loneliness became intolerable.  Her condition at last affected Mrs. Markham, whose own idleness had been beguiled by writing to her husband an exhaustive account of her captivity, which had finally swelled to a volume on Todos Santos, its resources, inhabitants, and customs.  “Good heavens!” she said, “you must do something, child, to occupy your mind—­if it is only a flirtation with that conceited Secretary.”  But this terrible alternative was happily not required.  The Comandante had still retained as part of the old patriarchal government of the Mission the Presidio school, for the primary instruction of the children of the soldiers,—­dependants of the garrison.  Miss Keene, fascinated by several little pairs of beady black eyes that had looked up trustingly to hers from the playground on the glacis, offered to teach English to the Comandante’s flock.  The offer was submitted to the spiritual head of Todos Santos, and full permission given by Padre Esteban to the fair heretic.  Singing was added to the Instruction, and in a few months the fame of the gracious Dona Leonor’s pupils stirred to emulation even the boy choristers of the Mission.