told you then that I understood it all. You had
kissed me on the stone of sacrifice, but in that moment you were as one
dead; when you came back to life, it was otherwise. But fortune took the
game out of your hands and you married me, and swore an oath to me, and
this oath you have kept faithfully. You married me but you did not know
whom you married; you thought me beautiful, and sweet, and true, and all
these things I was, but you did not understand that I was far apart from
you, that I was still a savage as my forefathers had been. You thought
that I had learned your ways, perchance even you thought that I
reverenced your God, as for your sake I have striven to do, but all the
while I have followed the ways of my own people and I could not quite
forget my own gods, or at the least they would not suffer me, their
servant, to escape them. For years and years I put them from me, but at
last they were avenged and my heart mastered me, or rather they mastered
me, for I knew nothing of what I did some few nights since, when I
celebrated the sacrifice to Huitzel and you saw me at the ancient rites.

'All these years you had been true to me and I had borne you children
whom you loved; but you loved them for their own sake, not for mine,
indeed, at heart you hated the Indian blood that was mixed in their
veins with yours. Me also you loved in a certain fashion and this half
love of yours drove me well nigh mad; such as it was, it died when you
saw me distraught and celebrating the rites of my forefathers on the
teocalli yonder, and you knew me for what I am, a savage. And now the
children who linked us together are dead--one by one they died in this
way and in that, for the curse which follows my blood descended upon
them--and your love for me is dead with them. I alone remain alive, a
monument of past days, and I die also.

'Nay, be silent; listen to me, for my time is short. When you bade me
call you "husband" no longer, then I knew that it was finished. I obey
you, I put you from me, you are no more my husband, and soon I shall
cease to be your wife; still, Teule, I pray you listen to me. Now it
seems to you in your sorrow, that your days are done and that there is
no happiness left for you. This is not so. You are still but a man in
the beginning of middle age, and you are yet strong. You will escape
from this ruined land, and when you shake the dust of it off your feet
its curse shall fall from you; you will return to