ld be. My
mother's blood forced me to seek this other, better world; thy blood
forced me to seek it wrongfully."

She paused, and gathered her fleeting breath.

Then, sitting suddenly upright, she flung both arms out to the setting
sun now lipping the sea, and cried:

"Gods I know not. Yet must there be such, else had I never known the
devotion of a Milo! Wherever ye be, brave Milo, living or dead, commend
me to thy own gods and forgive me for my ingratitude." She seized Venner
and Pearse by the arms as she fell back, and whispered: "In pity,
friends, set my feet toward the west, and launch my poor body down the
sun path as it sinks into the blue Caribbean that was my only home."

She relaxed with a little shivering sigh, the glorious eyes closed with
a tired tremor, and the spirit of Dolores the beautiful, the wicked, the
tempestuous, winged its way down the mysterious paths of the dark
unknown.

"Come," said Venner, suddenly shaking off his abstraction, "time is all
too short if we are to render her this last small service."

"How shall we do it?" asked Pearse doubtfully.

"We shall send her down her chosen path in a boat. Peters will load the
dingey with ballast, while you and I will lay Dolores out as well as we
may. Bring me that grating, Pearse. We will speed her in the dress she
loved. Her soul would sicken at a suffocating winding sheet. Hurry, for
the sun is half gone!"

Swiftly they worked, these men who had cause to remember the departed
siren without great love, and they placed her, secured to a grating,
across the thwarts of the dingey, to which the grating was in turn
secured. Then, all prepared, Peters sprang into the boat, bored a score
of auger-holes in the bottom, and as the great red sun set fierce and
blazing behind the black profile of the cliff, the filling boat was set
adrift, straight down the path of the luminary, bound ever westward,
until the sea gods claimed it and its passenger for their own.

"Farewell, place of ill-luck!" cried Pearce, as the schooner bore away
before the rising evening breeze. "May I never set my eyes on such evil
shores again."

"Then you will not come back to seek the treasure?" asked Venner, with a
shadowy flicker of a smile.

"Not for a thousand times the treasure that lies there!" cried Pearse
vehemently. "And I have seen it! The horror of this will haunt me until
my dying day. I only hope God will look kindly upon that poor woman,
that's all."

"I ho