taken, as if he thought the free cold air which entered
would protect him from spells, he showed himself at his ease, threw down
his bundle and faced her with an air of bravado.

"I need not have feared," he said with a tipsy grin, "but I had
forgotten what I carry. I have a hocus-pocus here "--he touched his
breast--"written by a wise man in Ravenna, and sealed with a dead Goth's
hand, that is proof against devil or dam! And I defy thee, mistress."

"Why?" she cried. "Why?" And the note of indignation in her voice, the
passionate challenge of her eyes, enforced the question. In the human
mind is a desire for justice that will not be denied; and even from this
drunken ruffian a sudden impulse bade her demand it. "Why should you
defy me or fear me? What have I done to you, what have I done to any
one," she continued, with noble resentment, "that you should spread this
of me? You have eaten and drunk at my hand a hundred times; have I
poisoned or injured you? I have looked at you a hundred times; have I
overlooked you? You have lain down under this roof by night a hundred
times; have I harmed you sleeping or waking, full moon or no moon?"

For answer he leered at her slyly. "Not a whit," he said. "No."

"No?" Her colour rose.

"No; but you see"--with a grin--"it never leaves me, my girl." He
touched his breast. "While I wear that I am safe."

She gasped. "Do you mean that I----"

"I do not know what you would have done--but for that!" he retorted.
"Maimed me or wizened me, perhaps! Or, may be, made me waste away as
you did the child that died three doors away last Sunday!"

Her face changed slowly. Prepared as she had been for the worst by many
an hour of vigil beside her mother's bed, the horror of this precise
accusation--and such an accusation--overcame her. "What?" she cried.
"You dare to say that I--that I----" She could not finish.

But her eyes lightened, her form dilated with passion; and tipsy,
ignorant, brutish as he was, the Spaniard could not be blind to the
indignation, the resentment, the very wonder which stopped her breath
and choked her utterance. At the sight some touch of shame, some touch
of pity, made itself felt in the dull recesses even of that brain. "I
don't say it," he muttered awkwardly. "It is what they are saying in the
street."

"In the street?"

"Ay, where else?" He knew who said it, for he knew whence his orders
came: but he was not going to tell her. Yet the spark of kindliness