low, scarcely audible tone,
"Do you still love me?"

"Child!"

"Then, protect my father and break off my marriage!" Here the
maiden told of her last interview with Ibarra, concealing only her
knowledge of the secret of her birth. Padre Damaso could scarcely
credit his ears.

"While he lived," the girl continued, "I thought of struggling, I
was hoping, trusting! I wanted to live so that I might hear of him,
but now that they have killed him, now there is no reason why I should
live and suffer." She spoke in low, measured tones, calmly, tearlessly.

"But, foolish girl, isn't Linares a thousand times better than--"

"While he lived, I could have married--I thought of running away
afterwards--my father wants only the relationship! But now that he
is dead, no other man shall call me wife! While he was alive I could
debase myself, for there would have remained the consolation that he
lived and perhaps thought of me, but now that he is dead--the nunnery
or the tomb!"

The girl's voice had a ring of firmness in it such that Padre Damaso
lost his merry air and became very thoughtful.

"Did you love him as much as that?" he stammered.

Maria Clara did not answer. Padre Damaso dropped his head on his
chest and remained silent for a long time.

"Daughter in God," he exclaimed at length in a broken voice, "forgive
me for having made you unhappy without knowing it. I was thinking
of your future, I desired your happiness. How could I permit you
to marry a native of the country, to see you an unhappy wife and
a wretched mother? I couldn't get that love out of your head even
though I opposed it with all my might. I committed wrongs, for you,
solely for you. If you had become his wife you would have mourned
afterwards over the condition of your husband, exposed to all kinds
of vexations without means of defense. As a mother you would have
mourned the fate of your sons: if you had educated them, you would have
prepared for them a sad future, for they would have become enemies
of Religion and you would have seen them garroted or exiled; if you
had kept them ignorant, you would have seen them tyrannized over and
degraded. I could not consent to it! For this reason I sought for
you a husband that could make you the happy mother of sons who would
command and not obey, who would punish and not suffer. I knew that
the friend of your childhood was good, I liked him as well as his
father, but I have hated them both since I saw that th