dible things have happened. Even now I am in a daze, for
history is being made every hour--history for Mexico, for you, and for
me. I bring you good news and bad news; something to startle you and
set your brain in a whirl. I planned to send a messenger ahead of me,
and then I said: 'No, this is a crisis; therefore no tongue but mine
shall apprise her, no hand but mine shall comfort her. Only a coward
shrinks from the unpleasant; I shall lighten her distress and awaken in
her breast new hope, new happiness'--"

"What do you mean?" Alaire inquired, sharply. "You say you bring bad
news?"

The general nodded. "In a way, terrible, shocking! And yet I look
beyond the immediate and see in it a blessing. So must you. To me it
spells the promise of my unspoken longings, my whispered prayers."
Noting his hearer's growing bewilderment, he laid a hand familiarly
upon her arm. "No matter how I tell you, it will be a blow, for death
is always sudden; it always finds us unprepared."

"Death? Who--is dead?"

"Restrain yourself. Allow for my clumsiness."

"Who? Please tell me?"

"Some one very close to you and very dear to you at one time. My
knowledge of your long unhappiness alone gives me courage to speak."

Alaire raised her fluttering fingers to her throat; her eyes were wide
as she said: "You don't mean--Mr. Austin?"

"Yes." Longorio scrutinized her closely, as if to measure the effect of
his disclosure. "Senora, you are free!"

Alaire uttered a breathless exclamation; then, feeling his gaze burning
into her, turned away, but not before he had noted her sudden pallor,
the blanching of her lips.

This unexpected announcement dazed her; it scattered her thoughts and
robbed her of words, but just what her dominant emotion was at the
moment she could not tell. Once her first giddiness had passed,
however, once the truth had borne in upon her, she found that she felt
no keen anguish, and certainly no impulse to weep. Rather she
experienced a vague horror, such as the death of an acquaintance or of
a familiar relative might evoke. Ed had been anything but a true
husband, and her feeling now was more for the memory of the man he had
been, for the boy she had known and loved, than for the man whose name
she bore. So he was gone and, as Longorio said, she was free. It meant
much. She realized dimly that in this one moment her whole life had
changed. She had never thought of this way out of her embarrassments;
she had been pre