My name is Arguello de la Yerba Buena." It is impossible to describe the timid yet triumphant, the half-appealing yet complacent, conviction of the girl's utterance.

A moment before, Paul would have believed it impossible for him to have kept his gravity and his respect for his companion under this egregious illusion.

But he kept both.

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.