out, she came at the
moment, and seeing him lying there, she threw up her hands, and fell
down beside him dead--"

"The poor little senora, dead too--"

"Not dead too--that was the pity of it. You see my father was not dead.
The officer"--she did not say sergeant--"who commanded the firing squad,
he was what is called a compadre of my father--"

"Yes, I understand--a made-brother, sealed with an oath, which binds
closer than a blood-brother. It is that, is it not?"

"So--like that. Well, the compadre had put blank cartridges in their
rifles, and my father pretended to fall dead; and the soldiers were
marched away; and my father, with my mother, was carried to his home,
still pretending to be dead. It had been all arranged except the awful
thing, my mother's death. Who could foresee that? She ought to have been
told; but who could guess that she would hear of it all, and come at the
moment like that? So, that was the way she went, and I was left alone
with my father." She had told the truth in all, except in conveying that
her mother was not of the lower orders, and that she went to the river
to wash her spaniel and her pony instead of her clothes.

"Your father--did they not arrest him again? Did they not know?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "That is not the way in Spain. He was shot,
as the orders were, with his back to the wall by a squad of soldiers
with regulation bullets. If he chose to come to life again, that was
his own affair. The Government would take no notice of him after he was
dead. He could bury himself, or he could come alive--it was all the same
to them. So he came alive again."

"That is a story which would make a man's name if he wrote it down,"
said Jean Jacques eloquently. "And the poor little senora, but my heart
bleeds for her! To go like that in such pain, and not to know--If she
had been my wife I think I would have gone after her to tell her it was
all right, and to be with her--"

He paused confused, for that seemed like a reflection on her father's
chivalry, and for a man who had risked his life for his banished
king--what would he have thought if he had been told that Sebastian
Dolores was an anarchist who loathed kings!--it was an insult to suggest
that he did not know the right thing to do, or, knowing, had not done
it.

She saw the weakness of his case at once. "There was his duty to the
living," she said indignantly.

"Ah, forgive me--what a fool I am!" Jean Jacques said repen