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 a tension she could no longer control or endure.

"I have never spoken of these things," she said in her tremulous soprano, facing McKinnon, "but I want you to understand. It was three years ago, when I was little more than a schoolgirl. I was under a great debt of gratitude to this man who—to this man Perralta. I had been left in care of the American Consul at La Guayra; I had taken an English steamship to Venezuela, after two years in a French school. I was to re-embark from La Guayra for Puerto Locombia, but quarantine was established on account of bubonic plague, before I could get away. I had to live at the consulate on short rations—the American consul had refused the demand of the Venezuelan Government for a certificate that La Guayra was free of the plague. He and his family were taken off by a United States gunboat, the Paducah, and I would have been sent to the detention camps, had it not been for this man Perralta."

"Go on!" prompted the other, as she paused.

"He seemed a gentleman then, and had money and influence. He played his part well. He leased a seagoing tug and had me and my companion, a young German woman, carried out of the infected district. After we had passed the necessary period of quarantine, for