"You love me, dear one?" I whispered, passionately, like a child in my longing to hear an avowal from her lips. She seemed to read the thought, and, putting an arm on each shoulder, she looked up and smiled. "Is this the garb of hate, Ferdinand?" she asked; then sighed and said gently, "If I do not love you, then am I really mad; and yet what is it but madness for us to talk of love? See! I kiss you of my own will—will, do I say?—of my own intense desire;" and reaching up she kissed me tenderly, half coyly; but growing suddenly bolder, closed her arms about my neck and pressed my face to hers, kissing me many times with feverish, passionate, intense fervour. "And if it be madness to love you, then, dearest, there was never so mad a heart and brain as mine. You make me burn out all else in the world when you kindle the flame of this love of mine." She drew back again and looked at me. "And I thought and meant never to see you again. What a creature of feebleness this love makes me!" "We will never part again, Sarita," I said, fervently. "Ah, that is different, that is all different;" and she unlocked her arms and fell away a pace, but I caught her hands again and held them. "We will never part again," I repeated earnestly. "You will let me save you. I can do it. I have come to do it." "How can you save me? Can you save me from myself? Would you tear me from my duty? Do you know what has happened? Ah, Ferdinand, when you make me think of aught else but our love, you force into my mind the barriers that stand between us." "There shall be no barriers that can keep me from you? Yes, I know much of what has happened. I know that by Quesada’s treachery this whole movement, on which you have built so much and laboured so hard, has collapsed like a house of cards. I know that through some treachery he had learned how matters stood in Daroca, and that his iron hand has closed on the place, and every hope you could have had there is crushed and ruined. And I know, too, that your only hope—as it is the only hope of any one of those whom he has duped—lies in flight. It is not too late for that, Sarita. But it is the only hope." "It is the hope I can never grasp. Ask me anything but that—anything but the cowardice of flight. If the people who have trusted and followed me are in this plight, can I leave them? Would you wish your secret heart to be ever whispering to you, ’Sarita was true to her love, but false to her courage, a traitor to her honour, a deserter of her friends in trouble’? Is that your ideal of the woman who would be worthy of your love? Would you do it were my case yours, and you had led these people into the slough of ruin? Would your ears be deaf to their cries from behind the prison bars—wives calling for their husbands, husbands for their wives, children for their parents—aye, and widows mourning for their dead?" "This is not your work, Sarita; it is Quesada’s doing."