"Hoy, friends," he hailed them. "Can one of you tell me the way to the plantation of Don Raymundo?"
The girl looked at him shyly under lowered lids; the grandmother, squatting on her haunches, puffed at a ragged fragment of cigar she carried and gazed out to sea; but the mother clutched volubly at the opportunity of speech.
"Go on till you come to the mango which blew down in the typhoon of ten years ago," she said, "and the road is there. It is called the 'Trail that has no Turning.' Don Raymundo is a Castilian of the noblest, and he is the richest _haciendero_ in the world. Each year he loads a hundred ships with sugar. The plantation is called the 'Hacienda without a Name.' Don Raymundo has a daughter whose name is Señorita Dolores. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. His wife is Doña Ceferina." For a moment a look of dislike crossed the broad, good-natured face. "They call her Doña, and she is very proud, but after all she is just a mestizo, almost a Filipina like us. She--"
Hazlitt broke into her chatter with his thanks, flipped a coin in the air, and jogged on till he had left them far behind, three moving dots on the waste, plodding the way of Malay womenfolk.
Hidden in the green-shrouded wilderness of the lower hills, the Hacienda without a Name lay under the sunset enchanting as a lost fragment of some old world, where labor next the soil was the happiest thing in life. And up in the _sala_ of the great house on the hill, the mistress of the _hacienda_ stared at Hazlitt over her cup. She was a beautiful woman, but under the Caucasian mold of her features another face was beginning to show dimly, the face of a race whose very heat and strength of life fuses all lines down to mere shapelessness of flesh. A part of Doña Ceferina had been overtaken by the unrelenting advance of middle age.
"You say my husband is a prince, Señor?" Doña Ceferina echoed doubtfully over her cup, and her soft forehead wrinkled in bewilderment. This strange young visitor had puzzling notions of what constitutes conversation, a diversion of which Doña Ceferina was extremely fond. "Without doubt," she said, "I think that is a mistake."
Hazlitt looked at her in mingled amusement and vexation. In all his wonderful day of discovery, this talkative, commonplace woman had been the sole jarring note. But Doña Ceferina, oblivious to his emotions, sat in the cool twilight of the big room and poised her cup, like some hybrid goddess of justice about to render a decision.