Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/114

 that. She was thin, according to Dominguez' thought of what a woman should be, almost as flat of the bosom—not quite, certainly, to be sure—as Guillermo himself, and she was twenty-five if she was a day. For this Dominguez did not like her at all.

"She will not do for Guillermo," he said to his wife as the guest entered the door, speaking with great politeness behind his hand, regretful that the exigency demanded the warning. "It must not be encouraged."

Dominguez expressed his disappointment in her to Padre Mateo as they sat smoking in the patio after supper.

"I had hoped she would do for Guillermo, but it is not to be considered," he sighed. "She would be a grandmother by the time he was thirty."

"Nothing is so far from her thought as a husband," Padre Mateo replied. "Her first confidence to me was that she wanted to become a nun. But that, of course, cannot be. There are no convents, no nuns, in California. Poor Gertrudis! I think she will have to marry somebody, in the end."

"Doña Magdalena will be a mother to her at the mission, and Don Geronimo a second father," Dominguez said. "She is going to a life as serene as if she had become the bride of Our Señor, indeed, but what use a poor pale thing like that will be to you there I cannot imagine. She looks as if she lived on the whites of eggs."

"There is great endurance, and great souls, very