"To stand as a guard over the soul of Rafael!" The old voice had a faintness, despite the steady words; the end of her strength had come. The eyes of Raquel widened ever so little as she realized what she was promising. There was an involuntary pause before she spoke again, and then the absolute despair of the mother, and her one hope, swept over the girl's consciousness, and a spark of the martyr fire lit her own soul. "To stand as guard over the soul of Rafael," said she, steadily. "So long as you both shall live!" "So long as--we both--shall--live." Then the crucifix fell to the tiled floor, and the old face looked very gray, as she sank back on the chair; and Jacoba smothered a shriek at sight of her eyes; and Raquel, still on her knees, clasped her about the waist and whispered: "Dona Luisa, Dona Luisa!" The staring eyes regained a momentary glimmer of consciousness at the sound of the girl's voice, and she lifted her hand again as though it still held the crucifix. "Until--the day--of--" and then the sentence trailed along into the eternal silences of the unseen land. "Senora!" called Raquel, appealingly; but Ana caught her by the shoulder and looked in her face, and said: "God help you, Raquel Estevan! To the recording angel she has taken that oath." * * * * * Keith Bryton closed the door on the weeping women, and walked out through the old refectory to the inner court, where he met Fernando. "What is it, senor?" he asked. Bryton looked at him much as though he had not been there. "I--I scarcely know," he said, dully. "You had better--" "But you have the face of a ghost!" interrupted Fernando. "Something has happened--in there?" "I think so," agreed the American, recovering under Fernando's curious gaze. "Some one is ill--or--" Fernando ran past him, and Bryton walked slowly along the inner court to where the one-time baptistry lay roofless to the sky. Through an old doorway with the Aztec sun cut in the coping, he passed into the old graveyard of the padres, and thence to the great altar-place of the old earthquake ruin. Even there the cries of the girls came to him through an open window--a wailing chorus of tragedy. Then an old Indian untied the ropes of the belfry, and the toll of death sounded along the valley. But it seemed very far away. He stared at the half-pagan decorations of the old stonework--never the cross of Christ anywhere on them--and sat so still that two linnets lit almost at his feet and were not afraid. "I wondered why I should stray back to this little corner of the world," he said at last, "and now--now I reckon I'm finding out. God! I feel like a bad dream. And my hands tied!" He paced back and forth on the old altar-place, until the mad clatter of hoofs coming from the sea cut across the tolling of the bells and told him the lost bridegroom--the man she said she loved and would never forget--had been found.