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The luxuriant tresses of the male Arguellos were combed and braided and tied with a ribbon every morning by the women of the family, and Concha's fingers were the gentlest and deftest. And Concha and Santiago were more intimate than even the rest of that united family. They had studied and read together, were equally dissatisfied with their narrow existence, ambitious for a wider experience.
He might come to California with fair words and a very definite intention of annexing it to Russia at the first opportunity, but he was incapable of abusing the hospitality of the Arguellos by making love to their sixteen-year-old daughter.
To ask you to confide in me; to tell me all you have been told, all that you know, think you know, or WANT to know about your relationship to the Arguellos or to any one. And then to devote myself entirely to proving what you shall say is your desire. You see, I am frank with you, Yerba.
The little town of San Diego has undergone no change whatever that I can see. It certainly has not grown. It is still, like Santa Barbara, a Mexican town. The four principal houses of the gente de razon of the Bandinis, Estudillos, Argüellos, and Picos are the chief houses now; but all the gentlemen and their families, too, I believe are gone.
For a sudden conviction that she suspected the truth, and had taken this audacious and original plan of crushing it, overpowered all other sense. The Arguellos, it flashed upon him, were an old Spanish family, former owners of Yerba Buena Island, who had in the last years become extinct. There had been a story that one of them had eloped with an American ship captain's wife at Monterey.
It is a corruption of de la Yerba Buena, of the Yerba Buena, and refers to the island of Yerba Buena in the bay, and not to the plant. That island was part of the property of my family the Arguellos you will find it so recorded in the Spanish grants. My name is Arguello de la Yerba Buena."
Rezanov had intended merely to pay a call of ceremony upon the hospitable Arguellos, but after he had dismounted and kissed the hands of the smiling senora and her beautiful daughter he was nothing loath to linger over a cup of chocolate. It was served out there in the shade of the vines.
The friends of the Arguellos would be proud to recognize and remember in the American heiress the descendant of their countrymen. All this passed rapidly through his mind after the first moment of surprise; all this must have been the deliberate reasoning of this girl of seventeen, whose dark eyes were bent upon him. Whether she was seeking corroboration or complicity he could not tell.
"Have you found this out yourself?" he asked, after a pause. "Yes. One of my friends at the convent was Josita Castro; she knew all the history of the Arguellos. She is perfectly satisfied." For an instant Paul wondered if it was a joint conception of the two schoolgirls. But, on reflection, he was persuaded that Yerba would commit herself to no accomplice of her own sex.
It opened to a servant bearing a salver with a card. Paul lifted it with a slight tremor, not at the engraved name of "Maria Concepcion de Arguellos de la Yerba Buena," but at the remembered school-girl hand that had penciled underneath the words, "wishes the favor of an audience with his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant-Governor of the Californias." Paul looked inquiringly at the servant.
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