her own appalled indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting his long
moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once, however, he
observed to her gently--

"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few words made
her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation. Perhaps the mere
fact of being born in the country did make a difference. She had a great
confidence in her husband; it had always been very great. He had struck
her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very
quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of
perfect competency in the business of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their
neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who
had represented his country at several European Courts (and had suffered
untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman
Bento), used to declare in Dona Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had
all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart.

Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan face,
could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have
heard said of his patriotism. Perhaps he had just dismounted on his
return from the mine; he was English enough to disregard the hottest
hours of the day. Basilio, in a livery of white linen and a red sash,
had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt
spurs in the patio; and then the Senor Administrator would go up the
staircase into the gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the
balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor
with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved
space is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet
hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on
the flagstones.