The people wondered much that the robbers who would kill a woman and steal a boat had not stopped also to gather up the scattered jewels strewn about her. But they had not. Not even a diamond was missing. They were gathered from the tiles, and the blood was washed from them, and the casket was taken to Raquel by Ana, who was almost as silent as Rafael. On that subject, never in their lives would they gain courage to speak. Raquel took the casket, and looked at the gems, but did not touch them. "And for such trifles she lost her life, perhaps her soul--who knows?" she said, in the same colorless quiet way, and handed the casket to her husband. "Rafael, have these put away for her child, when she becomes a woman. They were paid for by the mother!" From that night Rafael Arteaga was a changed man. Some said he had gone mad at the death of the woman there; others said that it was not the death of the woman, but the curse of the Arteagas had fallen upon him. No one ever heard him laugh or sing again; and when his wife brought pretty Marta's little boy from the willows, and had him educated to inherit after his father, the father accepted him almost without notice. Keith Bryton never came back. Letters concerning the child of Dona Angela were exchanged with Don Eduardo, who remained her guardian, and after that there were long years of silence. Only one man, far down the coast of South America, guessed what Raquel Arteaga lived through. Even to Ana, who had left her own land to join him, there were some things known to him of the old Mission days, and never told. [Music: _Al Fin_] CHAPTER XXII Raquel knelt no more at the shrine of the Madalena, but she went there nightly as the afterglow flooded the valley. Sometimes she rode her horse alone up the dusk shadows of Trabuco, past the portal of the aliso tree and into the inner court of memory. But always she kept the tryst of the first star of nightfall. When the years of the great war of the East came, she knew he was there. And when, after a battle called "Chickamauga," there came a tiny package from that far-away place, she stood in the dusk of the old temple, and slipped the ring of the Aztec eagle again on her finger. Then she knew that the end of the separation had come. * * * * * "If it were any other woman than you, Raquel Arteaga, men would say you rode to meet a lover, when you gallop like that in the night, and come back looking as if you had just been kissed," said Teresa, with watchful malice. "The old Indios say that you bathe in the night dews as a charm to keep young always. But why do you ride alone?" "Alone?" The woman who the old courtier had said held the opal fires of Mexico in her heart smiled on her sister-in-law at that question, and the dusk shadows of night and mystery were in her violet eyes. "I am never alone now, Teresa. It is a long time since I felt alone, a very long time." THE END [Music] [Illustration]