me my pajunda, Baltasar, and I will sing a grachalpa."

The beautiful child trembled, for the words were those of hatred and
triumph. She trembled, but she also wept. She was parting from those
whose lives were base and cruel; but they were the only human beings
that she knew. She was leaving a wagon and a tent, but it was the only
home that she could remember. In a vague and childish way, she felt
herself to be the sport of mysterious powers, a little shuttlecock
between the battledores of Fortune. Whatever her destiny was to be,
there was no use in struggling, and so she sobbed softly and yielded to
the inevitable. Her little hands were folded across her heart in an
instinctive attitude of submission. Folded hands are not always resigned
hands; but Pepeeta's were. She submitted thus quietly not because she
was weak, but because she was strong, not because she was contemptible,
but because she was noble. In proportion to the majesty of things, is
the completeness of their obedience to the powers that are above them.
Gravitation is obeyed less quietly by a grain of dust than by the rivers
and planets. Those half-suppressed sobs and hardly restrained sighs
would have softened a harder heart than that of this young man of thirty
years. He was rude and unscrupulous, but he was not unkind. His breast
was the abiding place of all other passions and it was not strange that
the gentlest of all should reside within it, nor that it should have
been so quickly aroused at the sight of such loveliness and such
helplessness.

To have a fellow-being completely in our power makes us either utterly
cruel or utterly kind, and all that was gentle in that great rough
nature went out in a rush of tenderness toward the little creature who
thus suddenly became absolutely dependent upon his compassion. After
they had ridden a little way, he began in his rough fashion to try to