"If her ladyship should," here put in a third personage of the sex feminine, who had just entered upon the scene, "if she should, I'll pay the debt myself. I pay it now--there!" It was Pepita who thus delivered herself, as she did so bounding forward, flinging her arms around his neck, and giving him a sonorous kiss upon the cheek! Then, as she released her lips after the smack, adding-- "I've given you that, _hombre_, for what? Why nothing more than doing your duty. Ha, ha, ha!" The laughter neither disconcerted nor vexed him. It was not scornful, while the kiss had been very sweet. Long-coveted, but hitherto withheld, he looked upon it as an earnest of many others to follow, with a reward he would more value than all the watches and rings in Mexico-- the possession of Pepita herself. CHAPTER FORTY TWO. A HOLY BROTHERHOOD. "Where the deuce am I?" It was Florence Kearney who asked this question, interrogating himself; time, the morning after their retreat up the mountain. He was lying on a low pallet, or rather bench of mason work, with a palm mat spread over it, his only coverlet the cloak he had brought with him from Don Ignacio's carriage. The room was of smallest dimensions, some eight or nine feet square, pierced by a single window, a mere pigeon-hole without sash or glass. He was yet only half awake, and, as his words show, with but a confused sense of his whereabouts. His brain was in a whirl from the excitement through which he had been passing, so long sustained. Everything around seemed weird and dream-like. Rubbing his eyes to make sure it was a reality, and raising his head from the hard pillow, he took stock of what the room contained. An easy task that. Only a ricketty chair, on which lay a pair of duelling pistols--one of the pairs found under the carriage cushions--and his hat hanging on its elbow. Not a thing more except a bottle, greasy around the neck, from a tallow candle that had guttered and burnt out, standing on the uncarpeted stone floor beside his own boots, just as he had drawn them off. Why he had not noticed these surroundings on the night before was due to extreme fatigue and want of sleep. Possibly, the Burgundy, mixed with the Madeira and Old Pedro Ximenes, had something to do with it. In any case he had dropped down upon the mat of palm, and became oblivious, almost on the moment of his entering this strange sleeping chamber, to which the mayor-domo had conducted him. "Queer crib it is," he continued to soliloquise, after making survey of the room and its containings, "for a bedroom. I don't remember ever having slept in so small a one, except aboard ship, or in a prison-cell. How like the last it looks!" It did somewhat, though not altogether. There were points of difference, as a niche in the wall, with a plaster cast on a plinth, apparently the image of some saint, with carvings in the woodwork, crosses, and other emblems of piety.