nother
chapel nearer. Eagerly ten or twenty persons snapped at the bait, flocked
out, and the instant their backs were turned, I half dragged, half carried
Monica in. Then before she could escape, if she had wished to try, the
great iron gates were shut and locked upon us.

"They will be looking everywhere for you," I said. "Come with me to the
back where it is so dark that no one can see us. This chapel must seem to
be empty."

"I want to be found," the girl answered cruelly. "I'm going to marry the
Duke."

"If you love him and not me, I shan't lift my hand to keep you," I said.
"The other night I believed it was so, and made up my mind to trouble you
no more. But Miss O'Donnel said--"

"Miss O'Donnel!" exclaimed Monica. "I wonder you can speak of her to me."

Her voice quivered with angry scorn, yet my heart leaped with joy at the
words which confirmed Pilar's suspicions and my hopes.

"She's as loyally your friend as I am loyally your lover," I assured her.
"Now listen. There are things which you must hear; and if when you've
heard them you ask me to take you to your mother and Carmona, I'll obey
instantly." Then, without giving her time to cut me short, I began to talk
of the letter I had written at Manzanares, and how I sent it, and what it
had said. "Did you get it?" I asked.

"No such letter as that. It was a very different one--a horrible letter.
Oh, Ramon! if it were true; if _you_ had been true! If you could have gone
on loving me!" She broke into sobbing, and hid her face between her hands.

"Don't dare to doubt that I did, and always will. Tell me what the letter
said?" I pulled her hands down, too roughly perhaps, and held them fast in
mine.

She tried to check her sobs. "I could show you the letter if there were a
light. Since that day I've carried it with me, so that I could look at it
sometimes, and have strength to hate you if my heart failed."

"My own darling--mine again," I soothed her. "It's been a horrible plot. If
that letter was not full of love and longing for you, it was forged; no
doubt after the handwriting of the one I really sent."

"You mean my mother--would do a thing like that?"

"She might have justified it by telling herself that the end sanctified
the means."

"I know--she was ready to do almost anything to turn me from you," Monica
admitted, leaning against me so confidingly that all I had suffered was
forgotten. "I couldn't have believed this of her; but--she did tell