. He gazed at the sad and altered face, once so beautiful,
so dear. "I should hardly have known you, Senora!" burst from him
involuntarily.

She smiled piteously, with no resentment. "That is not strange. I hardly
know myself," she whispered. "Life has dealt very hardly with me.
I should not have known you either--Angus." She pronounced his name
hesitatingly, half appealingly. At the sound of the familiar syllables,
so long unheard, the man's heart broke down. He buried his face in his
hands, and sobbed out: "O Ramona, forgive me! I brought the child here,
not wholly in love; partly in vengeance. But I am melted now. Are you
sure you wish to keep her? I will take her away if you are not."

"Never, so long as I live, Angus," replied Senora Ortegna. "Already I
feel that she is a mercy from the Lord. If my husband sees no offence in
her presence, she will be a joy in my life. Has she been christened?"

Angus cast his eyes down. A sudden fear smote him. "Before I had thought
of bringing her to you," he stammered, "at first I had only the thought
of giving her to the Church. I had had her christened by"--the words
refused to leave his lips--"the name--Can you not guess, Senora, what
name she bears?"

The Senora knew. "My own?" she said.

Angus bowed his head. "The only woman's name that my lips ever spoke
with love," he said, reassured, "was the name my daughter should bear."

"It is well," replied the Senora. Then a great silence fell between
them. Each studied the other's face, tenderly, bewilderedly. Then by a
simultaneous impulse they drew nearer. Angus stretched out both his arms
with a gesture of infinite love and despair, bent down and kissed the
hands which lovingly held his sleeping child.

"God bless you, Ramona! Farewell! You will never see me more," he cried,
and was gone.

In a moment more he reappeared on the threshold of the door, but only to
say in a low tone, "There is no need to be alarmed if the child does not
wake for some hours yet. She has had a safe sleeping-potion given her.
It will not harm her."

One more long lingering look into each other's faces, and the two
lovers, so strangely parted, still more strangely met, had parted again,
forever. The quarter of a century which had lain between them had been
bridged in both their hearts as if it were but a day. In the heart
of the man it was the old passionate adoring love reawakening;
a resurrection of the buried dead, to full life, with lineam