this knave de
Garcia? Let him be, and he will avenge himself upon himself. Otherwise
you may undergo much toil and danger, and in the end lose love, and
life, and fortune at a blow.'

'But I have sworn to kill him,' I answered, 'and how can I break so
solemn an oath? How could I sit at home in peace beneath the burden of
such shame?'

'I do not know; it is not for me to judge. You must do as you wish, but
in the doing of it, it may happen that you will fall into greater shames
than this. You have fought the man and he has escaped you. Let him go if
you are wise. Now bend down and kiss me, and bid me farewell. I do not
desire that you should see me die, and my death is near. I cannot tell
if we shall meet again when in your turn you have lain as I lie now, or
if we shape our course for different stars. If so, farewell for ever.'

Then I leant down and kissed him on the forehead, and as I did so I
wept, for not till this hour did I learn how truly I had come to love
him, so truly that it seemed to me as though my father lay there dying.

'Weep not,' he said, 'for all our life is but a parting. Once I had a
son like you, and ours was the bitterest of farewells. Now I go to seek
for him again who could not come back to me, so weep not because I die.
Good-bye, Thomas Wingfield. May God prosper and protect you! Now go!'

So I went weeping, and that night, before the dawn, all was over with
Andres de Fonseca. They told me that he was conscious to the end and
died murmuring the name of that son of whom he spoke in his last words
to me.

What was the history of this son, or of Fonseca himself, I never
learned, for like an Indian he hid his trail as step by step he wandered
down the path of life. He never spoke of his past, and in all the books
and documents that he left behind him there is no allusion to it. Once,
some years ago, I read through the cipher volumes of records that I have
spoken of, and of which he gave me the key before he died. They stand
before me on the shelf as I write, and in them are many histories of
shame, sorrow, and evil, of faith deluded and innocence betrayed, of
the cruelty of priests, of avarice triumphant over love, and of love
triumphant over death--enough, indeed, to furnish half a hundred of
true romances. But among these chronicles of a generation now past and
forgotten, there is no mention of Fonseca's own name and no hint of his
own story. It is lost for ever, and perhaps this is well.