“Twice I was arrested in the French lines, where I had crept dressed like a _poilu_, from where I shot down many a Prussian. Is it not so?” “It is true,” answered the girl, nodding her head. “They caught me and arrested me,” said Madame, with a sort of triumph. “If it had been the British”--she raised her hand in that Bernhardt gesture--“with me it would have gone hard. But in France a woman’s smile goes farther than in England. I had had my fun. They called me ‘good comrade!’ Perhaps I paid with a kiss. What does it matter? But they heard of me, those Prussian dogs. They knew and could not forgive. How often did they come over to bomb us, Val, dear?” “Oh, many, many times,” said the girl, shudderingly. “And at last they succeeded,” added Madame, bitterly. “God! the black villains! Let me not think of it.” She clenched her hands and closed her eyes entirely, but presently resumed again: “If they had killed me I should have been glad, but they only made of me a cripple. M. de Stämer had been killed a few weeks before this. I am sorry I forgot to mention it. I was a widow. And when after this catastrophe I could be moved, I went to a little villa belonging to my husband at Nice, to gain strength, and this child came with me, like a ray of sunshine. “Here, to wake the fire in my heart, came Juan, deserted, broken, wounded in soul, but most of all in pride, in that evil pride which belongs to his race, which is so different from the pride of France, but for which all the same I could never hate him. “Ysola de Valera had run away from his great house in Cuba. Yes! A woman had dared to leave him, the man who had left so many women. To me it was pathetic. I was sorry for him. He had been searching the world for her. He loved this little golden-haired girl as he had never loved me. But to me he came with his broken heart, and I”--her voice trembled--“I took him back. He still cared for me, you understand. Ah!” She laughed. “I am not a woman who is lightly forgotten. But the great passion that burned in his Spanish soul was revenge. “He was a broken man not only in mind, but in body. Let me tell you. In that island which I have not named there is a horrible disease called by the natives the Creeping Sickness. It is supposed to come from a poisonous place named the Black Belt, and a part of this Black Belt is near, too near, to the hacienda in which Juan sometimes lived.” Paul Harley started and glanced at me significantly. “They think, those simple negroes, that it is witchcraft, Voodoo, the work of the Obeah man. It is of two kinds, rapid and slow. Those who suffer from the first kind just decline and decline and die in great agony. Others recover, or seem to do so. It is, I suppose, a matter of constitution. Juan had had this sickness and had recovered, or so the doctors said, but, ah!” She lay back, shaking her finger characteristically.