he stood and looked up the road, her
cheeks pale, her eyes dilated with self-pity and tears.

"I am like Sarita! Yes--Sarita!" She remembered with superstitious
tremor all the things that had been said to her of the punishment that
would fall upon her because of her hard-heartedness. She remembered
Jovita's prophecies, and how she had mocked them; how cruel she had been
to those who suffered for her; how she had laughed in their faces and
turned away from their sighs.

She remembered Felipe, whom she had not spared one pang--Felipe, at whom
she had only stared in scorn when he wept and wrung his hands before
her. Had he felt like this when she sent him back to Seville to despair?

A cruel fever of restlessness burned her. She could find pleasure no
more in the novelties of the city, in the gayeties of the gardens, in
her own beauty.

Sometimes she was sure it was magic--the evil-eye. And she slipped
away, poor child! and knelt in the still, cool church, and prayed to be
delivered.

But once as she was doing this a sudden thought struck her.

"Not to think of him any more," she said, knitting her brows with yet
another new pang. "Not to remember his face--not to remember his voice
and the words he said! No, no!" And her rosary slipped from her fingers
and fell upon the stone floor, and she picked it up and rose from her
knees and went away.

All that day and night she thought and thought, and the next day went
to pray again--but not that she might be delivered. She brought to the
shrine at which she knelt substantial promises as offerings. Hers were
not the prayers of a saint, but of a passionate, importunate child,
self-willed and tempestuous. She would not have prayed if she could have
hoped for help from any earthly means. She had never prayed for anything
before. She had always taken what she wanted and gone her way; but she
had had few needs. Now in this strange anguish she could do nothing for
herself, and surely it was the place of the Virgin and the saints to
help her. She stormed the painted wax figure in its niche with appeals
which were innocently like demands.

Make him come back--make him come back to her. Mother of God, he must
return! Make him come to the wall some night--yes, to-night. He must not
know that she was like Sarita, but he must come; and whatsoever she did
or said he must not go away again. She would sell her new necklace; the
silver comb her mother had left, her--the comb her father