The incident in itself was a usual one, but she was conscious that her soul was moving uneasily and questioningly in some new and uncertain atmosphere.
She had felt it on her first entrance into Senora Valdez's gran sala--a something irrepressible in the faces of all the men present.

She remembered that even the servants had been excited, and that they stood in small groups, talking with suppressed passion and with much demonstrativeness.

And the officers from the Alamo! How conscious they had been of their own importance! What airs of condescension and of an almost insufferable protection they had assumed! Now, that she recalled the faces of Judge Valdez, and other men of years and position, she understood that there had been in them something out of tone with the occasion.

In the atmosphere of the festa she had only felt it.

In the solitude of her room she could apprehend its nature.
For she had been born during those stormy days when Magee and Bernardo, with twelve hundred Americans, first flung the banner of Texan independence to the wind; when the fall of Nacogdoches sent a thrill of sympathy through the United States, and enabled Cos and Toledo, and the other revolutionary generals in Mexico, to carry their arms against Old Spain to the very doors of the vice-royal palace.