She looked so pathetically young and so utterly alone, as she lay there, that all the man in him arose in protest, and a mist of tears blinded him for a moment to the beauty of her face. "Poor little one," he whispered, "my poor little broken Dona Espiritu--my one lady of the spirit!" The sound of the words did not wake her, but the sense of them reached her some way; for she opened her eyes suddenly, and without any shadow of wonder they rested on his face. "I waited a long time," she said at last, "then I heard your voice, and I knew you were coming to me." He set his lips tightly, and nodded, but did not speak. "I waited a long time," she repeated, as a child appealing for understanding. "Did they tell you I thought you were dead?" [Illustration: "THEN I HEARD YOUR VOICE"] He nodded assent. No one had told him so, but the words explained much. "You said you would come back if you lived, and you never came, and they told me--the padre told me--that you were dead!" "So I am," he said, gently; "and they told me, my lady of the spirit, that you had taken the final vow of the convent--that the night, our one night, was a thing you were forgetting under a black veil. Child, child! they lied to us, and now--" "Forgetting?" she said, slowly. "How does one forget a night like that, when we walked out of the wilderness into the day together? You never came back; and I--I wanted to be in the world where you had been, so I--" "I know," he whispered, gently; "I know, my dona of the spirit." He had not meant to touch her,--only to look at her and speak to her once, and then ride wherever fate might take him. But she reached her hands to him, and with a smothered groan he knelt by her couch and his arms were around her. "Don't weep like that!" she whispered, and laid her hand on his head. "I have wept enough for two, since our carriages passed and I found you had not died. And you--you knew all the time." "I knew when I saw you kneel in your wedding-veil and take that oath--not until then. I heard his mother say that he was the man you loved; and, soul of mine! you had not said as much as that in words to me. So I--"