ou?--you?" she said, half raising herself. "Ay,
Mary! is it the delirium?"

"It is I," he said. "I will take care of you. Do you want water?"

"Ay, water. Ay, thou wert always kind, even though thy love did last
so little a while."

He brought the water and did what he could to relieve her sufferings:
like all the rancheros, he had some knowledge of medicine. He held the
old crone under the pump, gave her an emetic, broke her bottle, and
ordered her to help him care for the girl. Between awe of him and
promise of gold, she gave him some assistance.

Estenega watched the vessel sail the next morning, and battled with
the impulse to leap from the window, hire a boat, and overtake it. The
delay of a month might mean the death of his hopes. For all he knew,
the bark carried the letters of his undoing; Reinaldo himself might
be on it. He set his lips with an expression of bitter contempt--the
expression directed at his own impotence in the hands of
Circumstance,--and went to the bedside of the girl. She was hopelessly
ill; even medical skill, were there such a thing in the country, could
not save her; but he could not leave to die like a dog a woman who had
been his mistress, even if only the fancy of a week, as this poor
girl had been. She had loved him, and never annoyed him; they had
maintained friendly relations, and he had helped her whenever she had
appealed to him. But in this hour of her extremity she had further
rights, and he recognized them. He had cut her hair close to her head,
and she looked more comfortable, although an unpleasant sight. As he
regarded her, he thought of Chonita, and the tide of love rose in him
as it had not before. In the beginning he had been hardly more than
infatuated with her originality and her curious beauty; at Santa
Barbara her sweetness and kinship had stolen into him and the
momentous fusion of passion and spiritual love had given new birth
to a torpid soul and stirred and shaken his manhood as lust had
never done; now in her absence and exaltation above common mortals he
reverenced her as an ideal. Even in the bitterness of the knowledge
that months must elapse before he could see her again, the tenderness
she had drawn to herself from the serious depths of his nature
throbbed throughout him, and made him more than gentle to the poor
creature whose ignorance could not have comprehended the least of what
he felt for Chonita.

She died within three days. The good priest, who s