ustained. But she replied that he had surmised
correctly, and added that she was Mademoiselle d'Aumerle.

He started at the name, and her eyes sparkled to note the effect. "The
Marquesa Juana de Aumerle!" he repeated.

"Jeanne d'Aumerle, no other, sir," she assured him, but she watched him
quizzically, for she knew that another name was hovering on his lips.

"Surely not----" he began.

"Si senor," and she smiled good humoredly, "I am--'Jacqueline.'"

It was a name that had sifted from the court down into distant plebeian
corners of the Mexican Empire, and it was tinged--let us say so at
once--with the unpleasing hue of notoriety.

"His Ever Considerate Majesty Maximiliano would be furious if any harm
should befall Your Ladyship," Fra Diavolo observed, "though," he added
to himself, "the empress would possibly survive it."

Jacqueline looked at him sharply. But in his deferential manner she
could detect no hint of a second meaning. Yet he had laid bare the
kernel of the whole business that bore the name of Jacqueline. She
betrayed no vexation. If this were her cross, she was at least too
haughtily proud to evade it. For a passing instant only she looked as
she had in the small boat, when she had said that about the mission of a
woman being to give. The next moment, and the mood was gone.

With knowledge of her identity, the project that was building in the
stranger's dark mind loomed more and more dangerously venturesome. But
as he gazed and saw how pretty she was, audacity marched strong and he
wavered no longer. And when she thanked him, and added that the ship was
only waiting until she finished her coffee, he roused himself and drove
with hard will to his purpose.

"Going on by water?" he protested. "But Senorita de Aumerle, we are in
the season for northers. Look, those mean another storm," and he pointed
overhead, to harmless little cotton bunches of clouds scurrying away to
the horizon.

"Eh bien," returned the senorita, "what would you?"

He would, it appeared, that she go by land. He hoped that she did not
consider his offer an empty politeness, tendered only in the expectation
of its being refused. He so contrived, however, that that was precisely
the way his offer might be interpreted, and in that he was deeper than
she imagined. She grew interested in the possibility of finishing her
journey overland. He informed her that one could travel a day westward
on horseback to a place called Valles, then