“No, Señora,” replied Ramona, meekly; and she glanced involuntarily at the saucer of musk which the Señora kept on the table close to Felipe's pillow.
“The musk is different,” said the Señora, seeing the glance. “Musk is a medicine; it revives.”
Ramona knew, but she would have never dared to say, that Felipe hated musk. Many times he had said to her how he hated the odor; but his mother was so fond of it, that it must always be that the veranda and the house would be full of it. Ramona hated it too. At times it made her faint, with a deadly faintness. But neither she nor Felipe would have confessed as much to the Señora; and if they had, she would have thought it all a fancy.
“Shall I stay?” asked Ramona, gently.
“As you please,” replied the Señora. The simple presence of Ramona irked her now with a feeling she did not pretend to analyze, and would have been terrified at if she had. She would not have dared to say to herself, in plain words: “Why is that girl well and strong, and my Felipe lying here like to die! If Felipe dies, I cannot bear the sight of her. What is she, to be preserved of the saints!”
But that, or something like it, was what she felt whenever Ramona entered the room; still more, whenever she assisted in ministering to Felipe. If it had been possible, the Señora would have had no hands but her own do aught for her boy. Even tears from Ramona sometimes irritated her. “What does she know about loving Felipe! He is nothing to her!” thought the Señora, strangely mistaken, strangely blind, strangely forgetting how feeble is the tie of blood in the veins by the side of love in the heart.
If into this fiery soul of the Señora's could have been dropped one second's knowledge of the relative positions she and Ramona already occupied in Felipe's heart, she would, on the spot, have either died herself,
