as born. Now the day came vividly back to him on which he had said
good-bye to that place, and looked with a melancholy disdain upon the
soft English fields. It was an earlier season of the year, a day towards
the end of March, when the skies were still but faintly blue, and there
was little green abroad. Ten years ago: how many things had passed in
those ten years, what struggles and successes, what struggles again, all
ending in that three days' fight and the last stand in the Plaza
Nacional of Valdorado! He turned away from the scene and pressed his
hand upon the latch.

As he touched the latch someone appeared in the porch. It was an old
lady dressed in black. She had soft grey hair, and on that grey hair she
wore an old-fashioned cap that was almost coquettish by very reason of
its old fashion. She had a very sweet, kind face, all cockled with
wrinkles like a sheet of crumpled tissue paper, but very beautiful in
its age. It was a face that a modern French painter would have loved to
paint--a face that a sculptor of the Renaissance would have delighted to
reproduce in faithful, faultless bronze or marble.

At sight of the sweet old lady the Dictator's heart gave a great leap,
and he pressed down the latch hurriedly and swung the gate wide open.
The sound of the clicking latch and the swinging gate slightly grinding
on the path aroused the old lady's attention. She saw the Dictator, and,
with a little cry of joy, running with an almost girlish activity to
meet the bearded man who was coming rapidly along the pathway, in
another moment she had caught him in her arms and was clasping him and
kissing him enthusiastically. The Dictator returned her caresses warmly.
He was smiling, but there were tears in his eyes. It was so odd being
welcomed back like this in the old place after all that had passed.

'I knew you would come to-day, my dear,' the old lady said half sobbing,
half laughing. 'You said you would, and I knew you would. You would come
to your old aunt first of all.'

'Why, of course, of course I would, my dear,' the Dictator answered,
softly touching the grey hair on the forehead below the frilled cap.

'But I didn't expect you so early,' the old lady went on. 'I didn't
think you would get up so soon on your first morning. You must be so
tired, my dear, so very tired.'

She was holding his left hand in her right now, and they were walking
slowly side by side up by the little path through the fir trees to t