after breakfast: “You'll have to look after things yourself for a few days, Juan. Alessandro has gone to Temecula.”
“For a few days!” exclaimed Margarita, sarcastically, when this was repeated to her. “That's easy said! If Alessandro Assis is seen here again, I'll eat my head! He's played his last tune on the south veranda, I wager you.”
But when at supper-time of this same eventful day the Señora was heard, as she passed the Señorita's door, to say in her ordinary voice, “Are you ready for supper, Ramona?” and Ramona was seen to come out and walk by the Señora's side to the dining-room; silent, to be sure,—but then that was no strange thing, the Señorita always was more silent in the Señora's presence,—when Marda, standing in the court-yard, feigning to be feeding her chickens, but keeping a close eye on the passage-ways, saw this, she was relieved, and thought: “It's only a dispute there has been. There will be disputes in families sometimes. It is none of our affair. All is settled now.”
And Margarita, standing in the dining-room, when she saw them all coming in as usual,—the Señora, Felipe, Ramona,—no change, even to her scrutinizing eye, in anybody's face, was more surprised than she had been for many a day; and began to think again, as she had more than once since this tragedy began, that she must have dreamed much that she remembered.
But surfaces are deceitful, and eyes see little. Considering its complexity, the fineness and delicacy of its mechanism, the results attainable by the human eye seem far from adequate to the expenditure put upon it. We have flattered ourselves by inventing proverbs of comparison in matter of blindness,—“blind as a bat,” for instance. It would be
