e could not see me; but Seraphina never flinched in her task of
moistening his lips with the strip of cloth she dipped in the brook,
time after time, with a sublime perseverance of compassion.

It made me silent. Could I have stood there and recited the sinister
detail of that man's crimes, in the hope that she would recoil from him
to pursue the road of safety? It was not his evil, but his suffering
that confronted us now. The sense of our kinship emerged out of it like
a fresh horror after we had escaped the sea, the tempest; after we had
resisted untold fatigues, hunger, thirst, despair. We were vanquished by
what was in us, not in him. I could say nothing. The light ebbed out of
the ravine. The sky, like a thin blue veil stretched between the earth
and the spaces of the universe, filtered the gloom of the darkness
beyond.

I thought of the invisible sun ready to set into the sea, of the peons
riding away, and of our helpless, hopeless state.

"For the love of God," he mumbled.

"Yes, for the love of God," I heard her expressionless voice repeat. And
then there was only the greedy sound of his lips sucking at the cloth,
and the impatient ripple of the stream.

"Come, death," he sighed.

Yes, come, I thought, to release him and to set us free. All my prayer,
now, was that we should be granted the strength to struggle from under
the malignant frown of these crags, to close our eyes forever in the
open.

And the truth is that, had we gone on, we should have found no one by
the sea. The routed _Lugarenos_ had been able to embark under cover of a
fusillade from those on board the schooner. All that would have met our
despair, at the end of our toilsome march, would have been three dead
pirates lying on the sand. The main body of the peons had gone, already,
up the valley of the river with their few wounded. There would have been
nothing for us to do but to stumble on and on upon their track, till we
lay down never to rise again. They did not draw rein once, between the
sea and the _hacienda_, sixteen miles away.

About the time when we began our descent into the ravine, two of the
peons, detached from the main body for the purpose of observing the
schooner from the upland, had topped the edge of the plain. We had then
penetrated into Manuel's inferno, too deep to be seen by them. These
men spent some time lying on the grass, and watching over the dunes the
course of the schooner on the open sea. Their horses were