ade it possible
for us to meet and speak, and then, in a little while, I came to know
what love really is.

"One day I learned that the Moro prisoner was to be beheaded the
next day. Word had come that a Spanish prisoner whom the Moros had
captured some time before, and with the hope of whose ransom this
man had been held, had been killed.

"That night"--the woman was walking the floor of the porch now--"I
killed my husband while he was asleep, set the man I loved free, and
we fled the city. By day we hid in the forests, and walked by night,
until we came to a part of the island where the Moros lived. Nicomedis
brought me to the town which had been his home, and we were married
and lived there.

"Elena is our child. You have seen her."

I realized cow the truth about the girl;--her strange appearance,
the color of her skin and eyes and hair. In my travels through the
islands I had once or twice seen other albino children.

The woman had sat down again.

"Our life in the Moro town was never wholly comfortable. My husband's
people distrusted me. I was of a different faith, and from a hostile
race. They would rather he would have chosen a wife of his own
people. When the child was born things grew worse. Some said the tribe
would never win in war while the child lived;--it was a curse. Then
came a year when the plague raged among the Moros as it had never been
known to do, terrible as some of its visits before that time had been.

"One day a slave, whose life Nicomedis once had saved when his
master would have beaten the man to death, came to our house and
told us that the people of the town were coming to kill us all,
that the curse might be removed and the plague stayed. My husband
would have stood up to fight them all until he himself was killed,
but for the sake of the child, and because I begged him not to leave
us alone, he did not. Again we fled into the forest; and because the
trees and the beasts and the birds were kinder to us than any men,
we said we would come up here--where we knew no man dare come--and
would live our lives here.

"Eight years ago my husband died." The woman was walking the porch
again, and sometimes she waited a long time between the sentences of
her story. "We buried him out there," pointing to where the forest came
up to one side of the enclosure. "It is easy for us to live here. We
have everything we need. We have never been disturbed before. Only
once, years ago, did any of the