I bade my love fareweel, wi' tears; He bade fareweel to me. "How sall I pass the lang, lang years?" "I maun be gane," quo' he. The tear-draps frae mine een did rin Like water frae a spring; But while I grat, my love gaed in To feast and reveling! The tear-draps frae mine een did start Salt as the briny tide: Sae sair my grief, sae fu' my heart, I wept a river wide. Adoon that stream my man did rove, And crossed the tearfu' sea. O whaur'll I get a leal true love To bide at hame wi' me? The lang, lang years they winna pass; My lord is still awa'. Mayhap he loves a fairer lass-- O wae the warst ava! How sall I wile my lover hame? I'll drink the tearfu' seas! My red mou' to their briny faem, I'll drain them to the lees! Then gin he comes na hameward soon His ain true love to wed, I'll kilt my claes and don my shoon And cross the sea's dry bed. "Oh in thine heart, my love, my lord, Mak' room, mak' room for me; Or at thy feet, by my true word, Thy lady's grave sall be!" "A melancholy air, yet with somewhat of a pleasing sadness in its minor cadences," commented Dona Orosia when I had ceased. "Translate me the words, an your Spanish is sufficient." "That it is not, I fear," was my reply, "and the task is beyond me for the further reason that the song is not even English, but in a dialect of the Scots. 'Tis only the plaint of a poor lady whose mind seems to have gone astray in her long waiting for a faithless lover"--and I gave her the sense of the verses as best I could. "Nay," said the Spanish woman, with a singular smile. "She hath more wit than you credit her with. You mark me, the flood of a woman's tears will bear a man further than a mighty river, and her sighs waft him away more speedily than the strongest gale. And once he has gone, taking with him such a memory of her, 'twould be far easier for her to drink the ocean dry than to wile him home. For let a man but suspect that a woman _could_ break her heart for him, and he----is more than content to let her do it!" She paused; but I made no answer, having none upon my tongue. Presently she added: "When once a woman has the folly to plead for herself, in that moment she murders Love; and every tear she sheds thereafter becomes another clod upon his grave. There remains but one thing for her to do----" "Herself to die!" I murmured. "Nay, child! To live and be revenged!" She turned a flushed face toward me; and, though the water stood in her eyes, they were hard and angry. "To be revenged! To plot and to scheme; to bide her time patiently; to study his heart's desire, and to foster it; and then----" "And then?" I questioned softly, with little shivers of repulsion chilling me from head to foot. "_To rob him of it._"