a--I have a secret--I will to you confess"--

"You must confess nothing," said Mrs. Brimmer, dropping her feet from
the hammock, and sitting up primly, "I mean--nothing I may not hear."

The Alcalde cast a look upon her at once blank and imploring.

"Ah, but you will hear," he said, after a pause. "There is a ship
coming here. In two weeks she will arrive. None know it but myself, the
Comandante, and the Padre. It is a secret of the Government. She will
come at night; she will depart in the morning, and no one else shall
know. It has ever been that she brings no one to Todos Santos, that she
takes no one from Todos Santos. That is the law. But I swear to you
that she shall take you, your children, and your friend to Acapulco in
secret, where you will be free. You will join your husband; you will be
happy. I will remain, and I will die."

It would have been impossible for any woman but Mrs. Brimmer to have
regarded the childlike earnestness and melancholy simplicity of this
grown-up man without a pang. Even this superior woman experienced a
sensible awkwardness as she slipped from the hammock and regained an
upright position.

"Of course," she, began, "your offer is exceedingly generous; and
although I should not, perhaps, take a step of this kind without the
sanction of Mr. Brimmer, and am not sure that he would not regard it as
rash and premature, I will talk it over with Miss Chubb, for whom I am
partially responsible. Nothing," she continued, with a sudden access of
feeling, "would induce me, for any selfish consideration, to take any
step that would imperil the future of that child, towards whom I feel as
a sister." A slight suffusion glistened under her pretty brown lashes.
"If anything should happen to her, I would never forgive myself; if I
should be the unfortunate means of severing any ties that SHE may have
formed, I could never look her in the face again. Of course, I can well
understand that our presence here must be onerous to you, and that you
naturally look forward to any sacrifice--even that of the interests
of your country, and the defiance of its laws--to relieve you from a
position so embarrassing as yours has become. I only trust, however,
that the ill effects you allude to as likely to occur to yourself after
our departure may be exaggerated by your sensitive nature. It would be
an obligation added to the many that we owe you, which Mr. Brimmer would
naturally find he could not return--and that,