Passing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the windows; and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out, and tremulously poised. Tender compassion was in every line of her tense body, but as their gaze met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully, and until the hack swung round the corner, there was her hand waving him farewell. The little journey might have been, a fete, and somehow, he was comforted. "I wonder," he mused, "if I've done very much for her, after all. Or for that American, named Driscoll? Will she--" He shook his head, and sighed. "No, she is not the lass to have him, not after my little scene of last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl, that is everything.--Alas, poor young man!" His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman's scream. It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out his head and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejia's hack, panting, stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held a babe in her rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the spokes. To the clumsy, pitying soldiers who would force her away, she cried again, "Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy...." A low murmuring grew on every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman back there was Mejia's wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the husband's face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color of lead. "May I, may I--_pay_ for this!" moaned the one-time Emperor. "O God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!" Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a throng, hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One gaping fellow pointed wonderingly. "Look, there they are! There--los muertos!" Maximilian overheard, and a cold shiver crossed his spine. To be identified already as "the dead one!" Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne up the hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared with black on the outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the drooping cord and golden tassels of richer caskets. It was the pomp and circumstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.