em, but send them away. To them I am
nameless and unknown. You can see that even my presence is a thing of
fear to them,--let them go!"

He stared at her across those frightened dark faces. It was true they
drew away from her in terror; her sudden uprising was as if she had
materialized from the cold tiles of the chapel floor. Kit noted that
their startled eyes were wide with awe, and knew that they also felt
they were gazing on a beauty akin to that of the pictured saints. Even
the glimmer of the candle touching her perfect cheek and brow added to
the unearthly appearance there in the shadows.

But Ramon Rotil gazed at her across a wider space than that marked by
the kneeling Indian women! Four years were bridged by that look, and
where the others saw a pale Madonna, he saw a barefooted child weaving
flowers of the mountain for a shrine where poverty prevented a
candle.

He had sold maize to buy candles, and shoes for her feet, and she had
given him the little brown wooden crucifix.

Once in the height of her reign of beauty in the hacienda of Perez, a
ragged brown boy from the hills had lain in wait for her under the
oleanders, and thrust a tightly bound package of corn husks into her
hand, and her maid regarded with amazement the broken fragments of a
wooden cross so poor and cheap that even the most poverty stricken of
the peons could own one, and her wonder was great that her mistress
wept over the broken pieces and strove to fit them together again.

And now it lay in his hand, bound and framed in silver wires
delicately wrought.

He had traveled farther than she during the years between, and the
memento of the past made him know it.

"Ramon, let them go!" she repeated with gentle appeal.

"Yes," he said, taking a deep breath as if rousing from a trance,
"that is best. Child--see to it, and have your way. Senor, will you
arrange that the senora has what comfort there is here? Our horses
wait, and work waits----"

He saw Valencia go with protecting, outstretched hands to Jocasta, and
turned away.

Jocasta never moved. To save her friends from his rage she had spoken,
and to her the big moment of humiliation dreamed of and feared had
come and been lived through. He had seen her on her knees among all
that brown herd made up of such women as his mother and her mother had
been. From mistress of a palace on an estate large as many European
kingdoms she had become an outcast with marks of fetters on her arm