"Senora!" I cried, "senora! the poor brute loved you!" She spurned the limp body with a careless foot, saying,-- "So did--once--the man who gave it me." Then she clapped her hands, and the negro servant came and at her command dragged away the carcass, wiped the bloody floor, and brought a basin of clear water and a linen cloth to bathe the scratch on her hand. When he had gone she made me bind it up with her broidered kerchief and stamped her foot because I drew the knot over-tight. "Dona Orosia," I said, when I had done it to her liking. "If all you care for, in this other matter, is to get rid of my white face, I pray you kill me with your dagger and ask your lord to let my love go free." She looked up curiously. "Would you die for him?" she asked. "Most willingly, an it please you to make my death his ransom." Still she gazed at me and seemed strangely stirred. "Once I loved like that," she said in musing tones. "I will tell thee a tale, child, for I like not the reproach in those blue eyes. Five years ago, when I was as young as thou art now, I lived with my parents in Valencia, where the flowers are even sweeter and the skies bluer than here in sunny Florida. I had a lover in those days, who followed me like my shadow, and, in spite of my old duenna, found many a moment to pour his passion in my ears. He was a brave man and a handsome, and he won my heart from me. Though he had no great fortune I would have wed him willingly and followed him over land and sea. I never doubted him for a day; and when he came to my father's house with an old nobleman, his uncle and the head of his family, I was well content; for my mother told me they had asked for my hand and it had been promised. But when my father called me in at last to see my future husband, it was the old man who met me with a simper on his wrinkled face. I turned to the nephew; but he was gazing out of the window----" She broke off with a fierce laugh and then added bitterly,--"And so I came to marry my husband, the Governor of San Augustin!" "The other was Don Pedro?" "Has thy baby wit compassed that much? Yes, the other was Melinza." "But if you once loved him why should there be hate between you now?" "Why? thou little fool! Why?"--she put out one hand and drew me closer, so that she could look deep into my eyes. "Why does a woman ever hate a man? Canst tell me that?" We gazed at each other so until I saw--I scarce know what I saw! My head swam, and of a sudden it came over me that when the angels fell from heaven there must have been an awful beauty in their eyes! CHAPTER XV. I awoke this morning with a sense of horror haunting me,--and then I recalled the scene of yesterday and the dumb appeal in the eyes of the dying hound. The story the Spanish woman had told me of her own past pleaded nothing in excuse. Hatred and cruelty seemed strange fruit for love to bear.