"Oh, Juan," Lucia whispered. Then Juan died.

"It's all that Agustin's fault," Papa said. Papa had been drinking ever since the burial. Juan was the youngest, and had always been Papa's favorite, as much for his independence of thought as for his resemblance to their mother.

"Agustin didn't tell Juan to steal the rabbit, Papa."

The look he gave her was ugly. Very ugly and scary. "Shut your mouth, girl. My son is dead, dead for a damned rabbit. I don't want to hear what you think."

It didn't quite work the way Luis and Agustin thought it would. Granted the wool did spin into better thread than it had been, but the thread was still weaker than it should be. It was all Agustin could do to keep from beating the machine into splinters, but he drew a deep breath and kept trying.

He went back to the papers. Finally, he had it. "Weights, Luiz. Weight on the first roller, to slow it down, so the wool will draw. A lighter weight on the second."

"Are you sure?" Luiz asked.

"When have we been sure of anything?" Agustin responded.

Lucia walked into the old mill upstream of the village with a breaking heart. She had just realized that she was truly and deeply in love with Agustin. Two things had told her so. She looked at her future without him and it was a bleak gray place that didn't seem worth the trouble. And she was coming up here to send him away because she cared more about him than she did about that horrible life. She had to tell Agustin that he had to leave but the words wouldn't come. She cleared her throat to prepare the way for the words she didn't want to say.

The two men looked up from the spinning machine. "We figured it out!" Luis said.

Agustin grinned at her. "I was waiting until we got this to work to ask your father, Lucia. But we're close enough now we know we can get it to work." Then he knelt right there on the dirty stone floor of the mill. "Lucia, will you marry me?"