"My fair princess," cried the impassioned lover, "it shall not be. These wide and glorious realms, teeming with untold thousands of brave and patriotic hearts, ready and able to defend our altars and our hearths, shall never pass away to a mere handful of pale-faced invaders. They _must_, they _shall_ be driven back. Or, if our gods have utterly deserted us--if the time has indeed come, when the power and glory of the Aztec is to pass away for ever, let the Aztec, to a man, pass away with it. Let us perish together by our altars, and leave to the rapacious intruder a ravaged and depopulated country. Let not one remain to grace his triumph, or bow his neck to the ignominious yoke." "Nay, my sweet cousin," she replied, with a tone and look of indescribable tenderness, "we will indeed die together, if need be, but let us first see if we cannot live together." "Live?" exclaimed Guatimozin. "Oh! Tecuichpo, what would I not attempt, what would I not sacrifice, to the hope of living, if I might share that life with you. But my country! my allegiance! how can I sacrifice that which is not my own?--that inheritance which was all my birth-right, and which, as it preceded, must necessarily be paramount to, all the other relations of life." "But, my father! dear Guatimozin! must he not be obeyed?" "Yes, and he shall be. But he _must_ be persuaded, even at this late hour, to dismiss the strangers, and banish them for ever from his domains. He has no right to yield it up. It belongs to his subjects no less than to him. He belongs to them, by the same sacred bond that binds them all to him. He may not sacrifice them to a scruple, which has in it more of superstition than of religion. I must go to the Temple of Cholula, and bring up the hoary old prophet of Quetzalcoatl, and see if he cannot move the too tender conscience of your father, and persuade him that his duty to his gods cannot, by any possibility, be made to conflict with his duty to his empire, and the mighty family of dependent children, whom the gods have committed to his care." "Oh! not now, Guatimozin, I pray you. Do not leave us at this terrible moment. Stay, and sustain with your courageous hopes the sad heart of my dear father, who is utterly overwhelmed with the dire omens of this dismal morning." "Omens! Oh! Tecuichpo, shall we not rather say that the gods have thus frowned upon our cowardly abandonment of their altars, than that they design, in these dark portents, to denounce an irreversible doom, which our prayers cannot avert, nor our combined wisdom and courage prevent?" * * * * *