o him. But he appeared less and less in public. He began to neglect
his practice; he resigned from his club; he avoided the company of
his former associates, taking his walks at night alone, even though
the sky was moonless, storms were threatening, and the cut-throat crew
were abroad that made life at some hours and in some quarters of the
city not of a pin's fee in value. His housekeeper told a neighbor
that on some nights he paced the floor till dawn, and that now and
again he would mutter to himself and appear to strike something. Was
he smiting his own heart?

Before long it was rumored, likewise, that the grave of Guayos was
haunted, or worse, for a black figure had been seen, on some of the
darkest nights, squatted or kneeling before his tomb. It was remarkable
that this revolutionist should have had a burial-place of his own,
when all his relatives and a majority of the people in his station
were interred in rented graves, and their bones thrown into the common
ditch if the rent were not paid at the end of the second year. Certain
old women affirmed that this watching, waiting figure in the dark had
horns and green eyes, like a cat's, while other people said that it
was merely the form of a man, taller, thinner, more bent than Guayos;
therefore not his ghost. But what man?

The anniversary of the hanging had come. The small hours of the
morning were tolling, heavily, slowly, over the roofs of the sleeping
city. Sleeping? There was one who had no rest that night. An upper
window of the house of Morelos looked out upon a court in which two
palm trees grew. They had been tall and flourishing. One might see
them from the court-room. But for a year they had been shedding their
leaflets and turning sere. Tonight their yellow stems had clashed and
whispered until the wind was down, leaving the night sullen, brooding,
thick, starless, with dashes of rain and a raw chill on the ground that
brought out all the malefic odors of the pavement. The window on the
side toward the court was closed and curtained. The one overlooking
the street was slightly open, and if the night-bird prowling toward
the den he called his home had looked up, or had listened, he would
have seen the glimmer of a candle and heard the eager scratching of
a pen and rustling of papers. For an hour in the first half of the
night Morelos had been walking about his chamber. At about three in
the morning the housekeeper, whose room was at the opposite end