ainst Morgana's breast.

"You will let me have my way--surely you will?" she pleaded--"You are a
little angel of mercy, unlike any other woman I ever saw--so white and
pure and sweet!--you understand it all! In his dreadful weakness and
loneliness, God gives him to ME!--happy me, who am young and strong
enough to care for him and attend upon him. I have no money,--perhaps
he has none either, but I will work to keep him,--I am clever at my
needle--I can embroider quite well--and I will manage to earn enough
for us both." Her voice broke in a sob, and Morgana, the tears falling
from her own eyes, drew her into a close embrace.

And she murmured plaintively again--

"His wife!--I must be his wife,--his serving-woman--then no one can
forbid me to be with him! You will find some good priest to say the
marriage service for us and give us God's benediction--it will mean
nothing to him, because he cannot know or understand,--but to me it
will be a holy sacrament!"

Then she broke down and wept softly till the pent-up passion of her
heart was relieved, and Morgana, mastering her own emotion, had soothed
her into quietude. Leaning back from her arm-chair where she had rested
since rising from her bed, she looked up with an anxious appeal in her
lovely eyes.

"Let me tell you something before I forget it again"--she said--"It is
something terrible--the earthquake."

"Yes, yes, do not think of it now"--said Morgana, hastily, afraid that
her mind would wander into painful mazes of recollection--"That is all
over."

"Ah, yes! But you should know the truth! It was NOT an earthquake!" she
persisted--"It was not God's doing! It was HIS work!"

And she indicated by a gesture the next room where Roger Seaton lay.

A cold horror ran through Morgana's blood. HIS work!--the widespread
ruin of villages and townships,--the devastation of a vast tract of
country--the deaths of hundreds of men, women and little children--HIS
work? Could it be possible? She stood transfixed,--while Manella went
on--

"I know it was his work!" she said--"I was warned by a friend of his
who came to 'la Plaza' that he was working at something which might
lose him his life. And so I watched. I told you how I followed him that
morning--how I saw him looking at a box full of shining things that
glittered like the points of swords,--how he put this box in a case and
then in a basket, and slung the basket over his shoulder, and went down
into the canon, and