u
have--forgotten your rose," he added, feebly, holding up the flower. She
halted.

"Ah, yes; he have drop, you have pick him up, he is yours. I have drop,
you have pick ME up, but I am NOT yours. Good a' night, COMANDANTE Don
Esteban!"

With a light laugh she ran along beside the wall for a little distance,
suddenly leaped up and disappeared in one of the largest gaps in
its ruined and helpless structure. Stephen Masterton gazed after her
stupidly, still holding the rose in his hand. Then he threw it away and
re-entered his home.

Lighting his candle, he undressed himself, prayed fervently--so
fervently that all remembrance of the idle, foolish incident was wiped
from his mind, and went to bed. He slept well and dreamlessly. The next
morning, when his thoughts recurred to the previous night, this seemed
to him a token that he had not deviated from his spiritual integrity; it
did not occur to him that the thought itself was a tacit suspicion.

So his feet quite easily sought the garden again in the early sunshine,
even to the wall where she had stood. But he had not taken into account
the vivifying freshness of the morning, the renewed promise of life and
resurrection in the pulsing air and potent sunlight, and as he stood
there he seemed to see the figure of the young girl again leaning
against the wall in all the charm of her irrepressible and innocent
youth. More than that, he found the whole scene re-enacting itself
before him; the nebulous drapery half hidden in the foliage, the cry and
the fall; the momentary soft contact of the girl's figure against his
own, the clinging arms around his neck, the brush and fragrance of her
flounces--all this came back to him with a strength he had NOT felt when
it occurred.

He was turning hurriedly away when his eyes fell upon the yellow rose
still lying in the debris where he had thrown it--but still pure, fresh,
and unfaded. He picked it up again, with a singular fancy that it was
the girl herself, and carried it into the house.

As he placed it half shyly in a glass on his table a wonderful thought
occurred to him. Was not the episode of last night a special providence?
Was not that young girl, wayward and childlike, a mere neophyte in her
idolatrous religion, as yet unsteeped in sloth and ignorance, presented
to him as a brand to be snatched from the burning? Was not this
the opportunity of conversion he had longed for--this the chance of
exercising his gifts of exho