kilt my claes and don my shoon
And cross the sea's dry bed.

"Oh in thine heart, my love, my lord,
Mak' room, mak' room for me;
Or at thy feet, by my true word,
Thy lady's grave sall be!"

"A melancholy air, yet with somewhat of a pleasing sadness in its minor
cadences," commented Dona Orosia when I had ceased. "Translate me the
words, an your Spanish is sufficient."

"That it is not, I fear," was my reply, "and the task is beyond me for
the further reason that the song is not even English, but in a dialect
of the Scots. 'Tis only the plaint of a poor lady whose mind seems to
have gone astray in her long waiting for a faithless lover"--and I gave
her the sense of the verses as best I could.

"Nay," said the Spanish woman, with a singular smile. "She hath more wit
than you credit her with. You mark me, the flood of a woman's tears will
bear a man further than a mighty river, and her sighs waft him away more
speedily than the strongest gale. And once he has gone, taking with him
such a memory of her, 'twould be far easier for her to drink the ocean
dry than to wile him home. For let a man but suspect that a woman
_could_ break her heart for him, and he----is more than content to let
her do it!"

She paused; but I made no answer, having none upon my tongue. Presently
she added: "When once a woman has the folly to plead for herself, in
that moment she murders Love; and every tear she sheds thereafter
becomes another clod upon his grave. There remains but one thing for her
to do----"

"Herself to die!" I murmured.

"Nay, child! To live and be revenged!" She turned a flushed face toward
me; and, though the water stood in her eyes, they were hard and angry.
"To be revenged! To plot and to scheme; to bide her time patiently; to
study his heart's desire, and to foster it; and then----"

"And then?" I questioned softly, with little shivers of repulsion
chilling me from head to foot.

"_To rob him of it._"

The words were spoken deliberately, in a voice that was resonant and
slow. 'Twas not like the outburst of a moment's impulse--the sudden
jangling of a harpstring rudely touched; it was rather with the fateful
emphasis of a clock striking the hour, heralded by a premonitory
quiver--a gathering together of inward forces that had waited through
long moments for this final utterance.

What manner of woman was this? I caught my breath with a little
shuddering cry.

Dona Orosia turned quic