disclosed--that I should cease to care for her, that her beauty and love
might pall upon me so that I should leave her, that 'the flower maid,'
for so she named Lily, who dwelt across the sea should draw me back to
her by magic; this was the burden of her madness. At length her senses
returned and she spoke, saying:

'How long have I lain ill, husband?'

I told her and she said, 'And have you nursed me all this while, and
through so foul a sickness?'

'Yes, Otomie, I have tended you.'

'What have I done that you should be so good to me?' she murmured. Then
some dreadful thought seemed to strike her, for she moaned as though in
pain, and said, 'A mirror! Swift, bring me a mirror!'

I gave her one, and rising on her arm, eagerly she scanned her face in
the dim light of the shadowed room, then let the plate of burnished gold
fall, and sank back with a faint and happy cry:

'I feared,' she said, 'I feared that I had become hideous as those are
whom the pestilence has smitten, and that you would cease to love me,
than which it had been better to die.'

'For shame,' I said. 'Do you then think that love can be frightened away
by some few scars?'

'Yes,' Otomie answered, 'that is the love of a man; not such love as
mine, husband. Had I been thus--ah! I shudder to think of it--within a
year you would have hated me. Perhaps it had not been so with another,
the fair maid of far away, but me you would have hated. Nay, I know it,
though I know this also, that I should not have lived to feel your hate.
Oh! I am thankful, thankful.'

Then I left her for a while, marvelling at the great love which she had
given me, and wondering also if there was any truth in her words, and
if the heart of man could be so ungrateful and so vile. Supposing that
Otomie was now as many were who walked the streets of Tenoctitlan that
day, a mass of dreadful scars, hairless, and with blind and whitened
eyeballs, should I then have shrunk from her? I do not know, and I thank
heaven that no such trial was put upon my constancy. But I am sure of
this; had I become a leper even, Otomie would not have shrunk from me.

So Otomie recovered from her great sickness, and shortly afterwards the
pestilence passed away from Tenoctitlan. And now I had many other
things to think of, for the choosing of Guatemoc--my friend and blood
brother--as emperor meant much advancement to me, who was made a general
of the highest class, and a principal adviser in his counc