him. Perhaps that will save you," his voice
was without conviction. "They won't believe you, and they may try
measures to get at the truth; but you will be faithful. You will keep
your secret, and--and I must go. I shall ask for you downstairs, make
them send up a servant, and shout as loudly as any."

She held up her battered countenance dumbly and, with a feeling of
transcendent reverence, he kissed her cut lips. Thrown across the end
of the bed, the shawl she had danced in, blazing with gay color, cast
the reflection of its carmines and yellows on the calcimined wall. It
was like a burst of the music which accompanied her dancing. The
castanets lay on the floor. The blessed saint of Cuban independence!
Then the caution that had become a part of his necessity rode
uppermost: he proceeded silently to the door, and, closing it behind
him, went, meeting no one, to the ground floor, where he pulled
irritably at the wire hanging from a bell under the ceiling. The raw
jangle brought a servant, a rosy-cheeked Gallego boy, heavy with
sleep, who went stumbling up the stairs on Charles' errand.

* * * * *

In his own room a wave of physical horror swept over Charles Abbott;
he was obliged to sit down, and the chair, the floor, seemed to rock
at the giddy sickness of the memory of Santacilla, stumbling with a
wine-colored face toward the window in a vain gasping for air, for
life. He recovered slowly: notwithstanding the death of Tirso
Labrador, the wasted shape of Andres' brother, all the tragedies he
had heard reported, it was not until now that he realized the entire
grimness of the undertaking against Spain. The last possibility of the
spectacular departed, leaving him with a new sense of the imminence of
death. He had considered this, under certain circumstances welcoming
it, or dismissing it with a creditable calmness, many times before;
but then his attitude had been softened by the detachment, the
impersonality, of his view. But at last the feeling of death was
tangibly at his own throat; not today, nor tomorrow, probably; but
inescapably. Well, he assured himself, he wouldn't, at that intense
moment, fail an inner necessity; but his understanding gave him an
additional feeling of the accidental aspects of life and of the Cuban
revolution.

Until then he had, sub-consciously, except for one short depression,
been certain of the ultimate triumph of right; he had thought it must
succeed