hat he
was not Mangora.

"A ray of hope flashed across her, and she asked where he was.

"'He was slain last night,' said the king; 'and I, his brother Siripa,
am now cacique of the Timbuez.'

"It was true; Lara, maddened with drink, rage, and wounds, had caught up
his sword, rushed into the thick of the fight, singled out the traitor,
and slain him on the spot; and then, forgetting safety in revenge, had
continued to plunge his sword into the corpse, heedless of the blows of
the savages, till he fell pierced with a hundred wounds.

"A ray of hope, as I said, flashed across the wretched Miranda for a
moment; but the next she found that she had been freed from one bandit
only to be delivered to another.

"'Yes,' said the new king, in broken Spanish; 'my brother played a bold
stake, and lost it; but it was well worth the risk, and he showed his
wisdom thereby. You cannot be his queen now: you must content yourself
with being mine.'

"Miranda, desperate, answered him with every fierce taunt which she
could invent against his treachery and his crime; and asked him, how he
came to dream that the wife of a Christian Spaniard would condescend
to become the mistress of a heathen savage; hoping, unhappy lady, to
exasperate him into killing her on the spot. But in vain; she only
prolonged thereby her own misery. For, whether it was, ladies, that the
novel sight of divine virtue and beauty awed (as it may have awed me ere
now), where it had just before maddened; or whether some dream crossed
the savage (as it may have crossed me ere now), that he could make the
wisdom of a mortal angel help his ambition, as well as her beauty his
happiness; or whether (which I will never believe of one of those dark
children of the devil, though I can boldly assert it of myself) some
spark of boldness within him made him too proud to take by force what
he could not win by persuasion, certain it is, as the Indians themselves
confessed afterwards, that the savage only answered her by smiles; and
bidding his men unbind her, told her that she was no slave of his, and
that it only lay with her to become the sovereign of him and all
his vassals; assigned her a hut to herself, loaded her with savage
ornaments, and for several weeks treated her with no less courtesy
(so miraculous is the power of love) than if he had been a cavalier of
Castile.

"Three months and more, ladies, as I have heard, passed in this misery,
and every day Miranda grew mor