It was Henry, after conferring with Enrico and obtaining his permission, who broached the matter to Leoncia. “Sweet sister,” had been his way, “we’re going to go up and see what the scoundrel Torres and his gang are doing. We do know, thanks to you, their objective. The dynamite is to blow an entrance into the Valley. We know where the Lady Who Dreams sank her treasure when her house burned. Torres does not know this. The idea is that we can follow them into the Valley, when they have drained the Maya caves, and have as good a chance, if not a better chance than they in getting possession of that marvelous chest of gems. And the very tip of the point is that we’d like to take you along on the expedition. I fancy, if we managed to get the treasure ourselves, that you wouldn’t mind repeating that journey down the subterranean river.” But Leoncia shook her head wearily. “No,” she said, after further urging. “I never want to see the Valley of the Lost Souls again, nor ever to hear it mentioned. There is where I lost Francis to that woman.” “It was all a mistake, darling sister. But who was to know? I did not. You did not. Nor did Francis. He played the man’s part fairly and squarely. Not knowing that you and I were brother and sister, believing that we were truly betrothed——as we were at the time——he refrained from trying to win you from me, and he rendered further temptation impossible and saved the lives of all of us by marrying the Queen.” “I miss you and Francis singing your everlasting ‘Back to back against the mainmast,’” she murmured sadly and irrelevantly. Quiet tears welled into her eyes and brimmed over as she turned away, passed down the steps of the veranda, crossed the grounds, and aimlessly descended the hill. For the twentieth time since she had last seen Francis she pursued the same course, covering the same ground from the time she first espied him rowing to the beach from the _Angelique_, through her dragging him into the jungle to save him from her irate menfolk, to the moment, with drawn revolver, when she had kissed him and urged him into the boat and away. This had been his first visit. Next, she covered every detail of his second visit from the moment, coming from behind the rock after her swim in the lagoon, she had gazed upon him leaning against the rock as he scribbled his first note to her, through her startled flight into the jungle, the bite on her knee of the labarri (which she had mistaken for a deadly viperine), to her recoiling collision against Francis and her faint on the sand. And, under her parasol, she sat down on the very spot where she had fainted and come to, to find him preparing to suck the poison from the wound which he had already excoriated. As she remembered back, she realized that it had been the pain of the excoriation which brought her to her senses.