doubt! Just putting
the bits of a puzzle-ball together so long as the game pleases you, and
leaving the puzzle in chaos when you are tired! Oh, ha! I know how fine
ladies and fine gentlemen play at philanthropies! But I am a child of
the People, mark you; and I only see how birth is an angel that gives
such as you eternal sunlight and eternal summer, and how birth is a
devil that drives down the millions into a pit of darkness, of crime, of
ignorance, of misery, of suffering, where they are condemned before they
have opened their eyes to existence, where they are sentenced before
they have left their mothers' bosoms in infancy. You do not know what
that darkness is. It is night--it is ice--it is hell!"

Venetia Corona sighed wearily as she heard; pain had been so far from
her own life, and there was an intense eloquence in the low, deep words
that seemed to thrill through the stillness.

"Nor do you know how many shadows checker that light which you envy! But
I have said; it is useless for me to argue these questions with you.
You commence with a hatred of a class; all justice is over wherever
that element enters. If I were what you think, I should bid you leave my
presence which you have entered so rudely. I do not desire to do that.
I am sure that the heroine of Zaraila has something nobler in her than
mere malignity against a person who can never have injured her; and
I would endure her insolence for the sake of awakening her justice.
A virtue, that was so great in her at noon, cannot be utterly dead at
nightfall."

Cigarette's fearless eyes drooped under the gaze of those bent so
searchingly, yet so gently, upon her; but only for a moment. She raised
them afresh with their old dauntless frankness.

"Dieu! you shall never say you wanted justice and truth from a French
soldier, and failed to get them! I hate you, never mind why--I do,
though you never harmed me. I came here for two reasons: one, because I
wanted to look at you close--you are not like anything that I ever saw;
the other, because I wanted to wound you, to hurt you, to outrage you,
if I could find a way how. And you will not let me do it. I do not know
what it is in you."

In all her courted life, the great lady had had no truer homage than lay
in that irate, reluctant wonder of this fiery foe.

She smiled slightly.

"My poor child, it is rather something in yourself--a native nobility
that will not allow you to be as unjust and as insolent as yo