"Had I not heard you were here, I should have been in Daroca at this minute, searching for you, Sarita."
Her hands tightened on mine, and her eyes were full of pain; but their light changed suddenly and grew radiant, and the soft colour streamed over her face.
"And you love me so well as that?" The question, the tone, the love in her eyes, the wondrous magic of her beauty, thrilled my every nerve and set my heart pulsing with passion; and for answer I drew her, now unresisting, to me, and pressed my lips to hers.
"You love me, dear one?" I whispered, passionately, like a child in my longing to hear an avowal from her lips. She seemed to read the thought, and, putting an arm on each shoulder, she looked up and smiled.
"Is this the garb of hate, Ferdinand?" she asked; then sighed and said gently, "If I do not love you, then am I really mad; and yet what is it but madness for us to talk of love? See! I kiss you of my own will—will, do I say?—of my own intense desire;" and reaching up she kissed me tenderly, half coyly; but growing suddenly bolder, closed her arms about my neck and pressed my face to hers, kissing me many times with feverish, passionate, intense fervour. "And if it be madness to love you, then, dearest, there was never so mad a heart and brain as mine. You make me burn out all else in the world when you kindle the flame of this love of mine." She drew back again and looked at me. "And I thought and meant never to see you again. What a creature of feebleness this love makes me!"
"We will never part again, Sarita," I said, fervently.
"Ah, that is different, that is all different;" and she unlocked her arms and fell away a pace, but I caught her hands again and held them.
"We will never part again," I repeated earnestly. "You will let me save you. I can do it. I have come to do it."
"How can you save me? Can you save me from myself? Would you tear me from my duty? Do you know what has happened? Ah, Ferdinand, when you make me think of aught else but our love, you force into my mind the barriers that stand between us."
"There shall be no barriers that can keep me from you? Yes, I know much of what has happened. I know that by Quesada's treachery this whole movement, on which you have built so much and laboured so hard, has collapsed like a house of cards. I know that through some treachery he had learned how matters stood in Daroca, and that his iron hand has closed on the place, and every hope you could have had there is crushed and ruined. And I know, too, that your only hope—as it is the only hope of any one of those whom he has duped—lies in flight. It is not too late for that, Sarita. But it is the only hope."