te Spanish
fashion understanding but one way of love, and being little interested
in brothers, felt the tears come to her eyes as Rollo's step waxed
fainter in the distance, and said over and over to herself with smiling
pleasure, "He loves me--he loves me! Oh, if only my mother had lived, I
might have been worthier of him. Then I would not have played with men's
hearts for amusement to myself, as alas, I have too often done. God
forgive me, there was no harm, indeed. But--but--I am not worthy of
him--I know I am not!"

So Rollo's hasty kiss on the dark balcony was provocative of a healthy
self-reproach on both sides--which at least was so much to the good.

Concha peered out into the darkness towards the south where a few stars
were blinking sleepily through the ground-mist. She could dimly discern
the outline of the town lying piled beneath her, without a light,
without a sound, without a sign of life. From beyond the hills came a
weird booming as of a distant cannonade. But Concha, the careless maiden
who had grown into a woman in an hour, did not think of these things.
For to the Spanish girl, whose heart is touched to the core, there is
but one subject worthy of thought. Wars, battles, sieges, the distresses
of queens, the danger of royal princesses--all are as nothing, because
her lips have been kissed.

"All the same," she muttered to herself, "he ought not have done it--and
when I have a little recovered I will tell him so!"

But at that moment, poised upon the topmost spike of the great gate in
front of her, she saw the silhouette of a man. He was climbing upwards,
with his hand on the cross-bar of the railing, and cautiously
insinuating a leg over the barrier, feeling meanwhile gingerly for a
foothold on the palace side.

"He is come to do evil to--to Rollo!" she said to herself, with a slight
hesitation even in thought when she came for the first time upon the
Christian name.

But there was no hesitation in the swift assurance with which she set
the rifle-stock to her shoulder, and no mistake as the keen and
practised eye glanced along the barrel.

She fired, and with a groan of pain the man fell back outside the
enclosure.

The sound of Concha's shot was the first tidings to the besieged that
the gipsies had really arrived. Rollo, stealing lightfoot from post to
post, pistol in hand, the Sergeant erect behind the vine-trellis on the
balcony between the rearward doors, Etienne and John Mortimer a li