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Rh can eyes that dropped tears on his gaunt face, and an intense feminine sobbing mingled with expressions of love for him shaken out of the abyss of a suffering woman's heart. The hot cheeks that rested on his own were those he was used to in the boy. The clothes on her limbs in all their pitiful poverty were the masculine ones he had liked to see so picturesquely carried, but the strain in the voice and the music of its words were new, and amazing, and appalling.

In the silence of weakness he listened, and over and over again he heard the reiteration of her resolve.

"There is nothing, beloved, that can drive me from you but the death from your hand which will not kill."

And after awhile he had said to her:

"Little one, why did you do it?"

But he had known it was the wisdom of the wisest before she had answered him, that for a girl this life offered greater perils as well as fewer chances.

She did not light their candle, but remained on her knees by the bed, getting his medicine at intervals by the lingering light that came in from the window.

"It will be just the same," she had whispered; "it need make no difference, señor."

And Frazer had lain there, facing the fact of the very great difference, in a regret that could fancy no arrangement not death doing to this woman who had nursed him, and had loved him, and had told him so.

"The woman at the hotel—the landlady," he had said to her in his weak, thin voice, "she would care for you if I paid her, or you might go East. You might go to school."

But the helpless poverty of his present condition had forced a wan smile on his dry lips, and the girl was writhing as with actual physical pain and would not listen.

In his weakened condition he could not concentrate himself sufficiently to adopt any decisive measure. He had felt the tumult of her emotions gradually still itself as he laid his hand on her short, black hair, and when her breathing was even and quiet he had asked her, feeling a revolt within him. "The doctor, and the boys—have they guessed it?"