sition on the beach she could readily see the Spaniards
as they took her dead lover from the chute when the tide had lowered
toward evening. She saw them even strike his corpse, and she bit her
finger nails as she watched them place him in a rough wooden box and
haul him up through the streets of the village on an old two-wheeled
cart drawn by a caribou.

With the approach of sunset, things grew strangely quiet. The spring
zephyr that had blown modestly during the day died away. There was no
longer even a dimple in the blue surface of Manila Bay. Not a leaf was
astir. It seemed to Marie that the only sound she could hear was the
the throbbing of her own heart. To her the whole world seemed like an
open sepulcher. Looking down she discovered that she was unconsciously
sitting on a flowery terrace and that all about her was life. She
pulled one of those exquisite white flowers with wide pink veins,
peculiar alone to the Philippines, and pressed it to her lips.

The sun was just setting beyond Corregidor. The island's long shadows
seemed to extend completely across the bay to her feet. As the solar
fires burned themselves out, the orange tint which they left behind
against the reddened sky reminded Marie of the night before, when
she and her lover had strolled along the shore of the bay about three
miles farther north; and as the sun slowly nodded its evening farewell
and buried its face in the pillow of night, she remembered how he, on
the previous night, had called to her attention the lingering glow of
its fading beams. Before her lay the Spanish fleet, it, too, casting
shadows that first grew longer and longer and then dimmer and dimmer
until they in turn had died away in the spectral phenomenon of night.

Marie's thoughts turned toward home. What about her mother? She walked
back to her little boat, pushed it out into the bay, and, stepping
into it, sat down, took hold of the oars and started northward near
the beach. Just opposite Fort Malate, she swung westward, and, passing
outside of the break-water a mile from shore, she entered the Pasig
river and hurried homeward. When she arrived, about nine o'clock,
she found her mother on the verge of prostration; for that very day,
strange to say, Marie's father, who was a colonel in the Filipino
infantry, had been killed at San Francisco del Monte, six miles
north-east of Manila, in a battle with Spanish troops.

"Don't cry, mother," expostulated Marie, "from now on I i