At that, the woman lying there within her faithful arms, stirred softly, and, once again, her glorious gray eyes opened, and she looked at poor old Mage whose face was all distraught with many wrinkles and with deep anxiety for her. Then she raised herself to a sitting posture and put her hands before her eyes as if to hide some horrible spectre from her sight, and, then, she looked at poor Estrella standing there not knowing what to do, for Mage would not allow her, even now, to come a single step nearer to her mistress, and then she spoke: "My poor Girl," she said, "My poor Girl, I too, sought to find the man I loved, but his body is not here. I pity you with all my heart and wish that I could help you bear your sorrow. Come to me and I will try to help you ... come this evening, just at sunset, to my house. I think you know which one it is.... Mage, you tell her where to come." For she had reached the limit of her endurance, for the moment, and old Mage, seeing her evident distress, hurriedly told Estrella where to come to find her mistress, and gave the orders to the coachman to drive home at once. And, then, Estrella went again into the habitation of the dead and the other woman, with her heart like lead within her breast, went back to her own place and left the body of the man she'd called her husband for a few short months lying there upon that senseless slab with the weeping girl beside it. CHAPTER V When the evening shadows were falling over the almost palatial home of Ruth Wakefield, the young girl whom she had begged to come to her climbed the rugged height upon which the former United States Consul had erected his residence hoping to occupy it long after his term of office should expire as he had found the climate very beneficial to the health of his entire family, as it seemed, and desired to have a fitting place of abode during the childhood of his only and much-loved child, who, now, a sorrowing widow and a humiliated wife, was sitting idly waiting to receive poor Estrella, not knowing, certainly, just what she would do or say when she had to really face the situation into which she had been forced by untoward circumstances. As Estrella reached the rear door, to which she had gone by an almost unerring instinct, feeling strange and unnatural among the rich surroundings, old Mage appeared to welcome her, as she had been directed by her mistress to do; the old woman was greatly in doubt as to the condition of affairs in the home she loved to be a part of and had longed to get hold of the peon girl alone.