derness Rollo and the Sergeant carried that
which lay on the grass within. In a moment more they had the door shut
and bolted, when from the rear of the hall came the voice of El Sarria.

"For God's sake," he cried, "bring a light! For I have that here which
is in human form, yet bites and scratches and howls like a wild beast! I
cannot hold it long. It is nothing less than a devil incarnate!"

* * * * *

Most strange and incomprehensible of all that the light revealed, was
the appearance of the giant El Sarria, who, his hands and face bleeding
with scratches, and seated on the final steps of the cork-screw
staircase, held in his arms clear of the ground the bent and contorted
form of a young girl. So desperate were her struggles that it was all he
could do to confine her feet by passing them under his arm, while with
one great palm he grasped two flat and meagre wrists in a grip of steel.
Yet in spite of his best efforts the wild thing still struggled, and
indeed more than once came within a hair's-breadth of fastening her
teeth in his cheek.

As he had said, there was more of the wild beast of the woods taken in a
trap than of human creature in these frantic struggles and inarticulate
cries. The girl foamed at the mouth. She threw herself backward into the
shape of a bow till her head almost touched her feet, and again
momentarily twisting herself like an eel half out of El Sarria's grasp,
she endeavoured, with a force that seemed impossible to so frail a body,
to reach the group by the door, where Munoz was still supporting the
Queen Maria Cristina.

Presently Cardono desisted from his examination of the body of the
waiting-woman. He shook his head murmuring--"Dead! Dead! of a certainty
stone-dead!"

And the Sergeant was a good judge of life and death. He had seen much of
both.

Then he came over to where El Sarria was still struggling awkwardly with
the wild and maniacal thing, as if he could not bring his great strength
to bear upon a creature so lithe and quick. At the first glance he
started back and turned his gaze on the royal group.

For that which he now saw, distorted with the impotence of passion and
madness, was no other than the little girl whom he had met in the camp
of the gipsies on the side of Guadarrama--the daughter of Munoz, the
plan-maker and head-centre of the whole attack.

The Sergeant stood a moment or two fingering his chin, as a man does who
consider