to make the wounded man understand the words of comfort on his lips. For
Jacqueline, the horror of it chilled her. Surely, surely, she thought,
the hidden tragedy must now unmask; because of its very awfulness, it
must! That the prince should be thus oblivious of such a knowledge, and
yet kneeling there, made the scene ghastly beyond words.

"I remember him," said Maximilian softly, looking up to the others. "One
of your orderlies, Colonel Lopez, I believe? Of course I remember him,
for I see him often. He is always near me. Even to-day, on the llano,
during the thickest of the battle, there he was at my stirrup, and there
he must have fallen, in humble, unquestioning loyalty."

Jacqueline drew back in relief, and she imagined that Lopez did also.
Maximilian had forgotten the hacendado utterly.

With a grunt of satisfaction the surgeon drew forth his forceps from the
wound and dropped a bullet to the floor. Next he gently rolled the
patient over on his back, and then it was that Jacqueline saw in
Murguia's hand, in the hand that had been under him, a little ivory
cross. Fainting, unconscious, he still clutched it, from Driscoll's
leaving him on the battlefield until the present moment. By now the
stains of his child's blood were washed away in his own. Jacqueline's
quick eyes caught an inscription on the gold mounting, and leaning close
she read the dead girl's name, "Maria de la Luz."

With the gripping of the bullet and its extraction, or possibly at the
sound of a voice--Maximilian's--the old man's eyes opened, and held the
Emperor's in a deathly stare. Jacqueline watched the piercing beads grow
smaller and smaller in their cavernous sockets, and all the while they
seemed to concentrate their intense fire. The others, except Lopez,
thought it delirium, but Jacqueline would have named it the very
blackest hate. "This man will live!" she said to herself, and shuddered.

Maximilian, seeing consciousness returned, spoke cheerily. "Ah, doctor,
you will have him well and sound within a week, I know? Look to it, sir;
a heroic veteran like this cannot be spared."

A strange distortion wrapped the visage of suffering. "Could that be a
smile?" Jacqueline wondered. But the Imperial party took its leave, and
the tragedy lurking beneath was not revealed, as yet.

Through the throng waiting outside the hospital to acclaim him again as
a prince victorious, Maximilian led the two girls to their coach, and
went with them to t