nner carries with
it an impression of power. Such was the woman whom I saw before me
now. Not young; dark of skin, clad only in the simplest possible
hemp-cloth garment, there was in her face a dignity which could not
but win instant recognition.

"Who are you?" she asked in Spanish. "And why do you come here?"

I told her as simply and as plainly as I could, who I was, and why
I had come up the mountain. She kept her place in front of the girl,
screening her from sight during all the time that we were talking.

When I had finished she stood silent for a moment, as if thinking
what to do.

"Since you have come here," she said at last, "where I had thought no
one would ever come, and have learned what I had hoped no one would
ever know, you will not, I feel sure, deny me an opportunity to tell
you enough of the reason why two women live in this wild place, so
that I hope you will help them to keep their secret. May I ask you
to go with us to the place which we call home?"

I said I would be glad to go, without having the slightest idea
where we were going. I should have said it just the same, I think,
if I had known she was going to lead me straight down into the crater
of the volcano.

"Elena," the older woman said, speaking to the girl. Then she said
something else, in a native dialect which I did not understand.

The girl came out from the place where she had been hidden, and
passed behind the rocks. When I saw her face, now, I saw what I had
not perceived before. She was blind.

When the girl had been gone a little time the woman said: "Will you
follow me?"

She waited until I had climbed up to where she stood, and then led
the way around the rock behind which the girl had disappeared. A well
defined path led from that place down into the dwarfed vegetation,
and then, through that to the forest beyond. The girl was already some
distance down this path, walking rather slowly, as blind people walk,
but steadily, and with fingers outstretched here and there to touch
the bushes on each side.

We followed. Where the trees began to be tall enough to furnish
shelter, my guide stopped, pushed aside the branches of what
appeared to be an impenetrable thicket, and motioned me to follow
her through. The girl had disappeared again. The opening through
which we went was so thoroughly hidden that I might have gone past
it fifty times and never suspected it was there, or thought that the
path down which we had come wa