s left with the mere comfort of having
done what I thought was right. It was cold comfort when every feeling
in me had been outraged by the doing, and now the forlorn doubt
continually stirred as to the certainty that what I had done was right,
if, as the Spanish Woman said, love was a woman's only virtue.

I was horrified to find myself, without apparent reason or any evident
leading up to it, with that word on my lips. Love? Why, what had that
to do with me? I looked in a fright at mother, as if I expected her to
answer the question; but that timid look of hers seemed to have only a
reflection of my own fear in it. With a sudden feeling of weakness and
helplessness I hid my face in my hands.

From that moment I began to understand what father had meant the day he
had said that I would need mother's picture now. It comforted me that
she was there watching me and seeming to understand, never looking
angrily at me no matter what foolish or frightening things I had to
tell her, and there were so many in those days that followed--dreadful
days for me! The very girls, my friends, even while with round, awed
eyes they admired me for my heroic performance on the witness-stand,
yet, for that very reason seemed to set me a little apart from
themselves. And then the talk about the search for Johnny Montgomery,
full of the cruel eagerness of men hunting a man!

The word had been that, of course, he would be retaken immediately.
But the hours slipped away, and the days, and still there was no trace
of him. The whole city was searched, and I discovered then that the
Spanish Woman was far from escaping public suspicion. Detectives went
in and out of her house, ransacking its remotest, most cunningly
concealed places. She herself was closely questioned, but nothing
could be elicited.

If I had needed any reassurance that she alone was responsible for
Johnny's disappearance, this effacement of the means by which she had
accomplished her object would have convinced me. Whatever creatures
they were who had effected her purpose for her, they were apt pupils in
her art of disappearance, and even those who had failed here, were
still completely hers. The Mexican who had been wounded by the guard
had closed his teeth and died without a word, not even a confession to
the priest. The horsemen, it was said, had swept straight through the
city in the direction of the Mission, and it was supposed they had
disbanded there and sc