"Augustine! Augustine! thank God, I have found you here! How much I love you! When they told me that you were the jailer of my father, I was wild with delight, for I know that you will save him. Those savages of the council have condemned him to death. He to die who has done harm to no one! But God does not wish the innocent to perish, and He has put him in your hands, so that you may let him escape!"
"Oh, my heart's Mariquilla," said Augustine, "leave me, I pray you! I don't wish to see you. To-morrow—to-morrow we will talk. I love you, too. I am mad for you. Let Saragossa perish, but don't leave off loving me! They expected me to kill your father."
"Oh, God, do not say that!" cried the girl. "Thou!"
"No, a thousand times no! Let others punish his treachery."
"No, it is a lie! My father is not a traitor. Do you also accuse him? I never have believed it. Augustine, it is night. Untie his hands; take off the fetters that hurt his feet. Set him at liberty. No one can see. We will flee. We will hide ourselves in the ruins of our house, there by the cypress where so many times we have seen the spire of the Torre Nueva."
"Mariquilla, wait a little," said Montoria, with great agitation. "This cannot be done so. There are many people in the plaza. The soldiers are greatly incensed against the prisoner. To-morrow—"
"To-morrow! What do you say? You are laughing at me. Set him at liberty this instant. Augustine, if you do not do it, I shall believe that I have loved the most vile, the most cowardly, the most despicable of men."
"Mariquilla, God hears us. God knows that I adore you. By Him I swear that I will not stain my hands with the blood of this unhappy man. I will sooner break my sword. But—in the name of God, I tell you also that I cannot set your father at liberty. Mariquilla, Heaven is against us."
"Augustine, you are deceiving me," said the girl, anguished and bewildered. "Do you tell me that you will not set him at liberty?"
"Oh, no, I cannot. If God should come in human form to ask of me the freedom of him who sold our heroic peasants, delivered them up to the French sword, I would not do it. It is a supreme duty, in which one cannot fail. The innumerable victims immolated by his treachery, the city surrendered, the national honor outraged, are things which weigh too strongly upon my conscience."