"'May it sting me to death if I am not forever true to you,' he uttered solemnly, before she could finish.
"Again she strove to search his soul.
"'My ears never weary of it,' she said; 'once more, do you love me?'
"'Once more, my Paquita, life of my life, soul of my soul. Once more, if my heart is ever false to you may this token of our troth still it forever.'"
So a mockery of a ceremony led to five short months of almost delirious happiness, and then—
"Then, hear!" gasped the dying man. "In five short months he tired of her, my beautiful one; he laughed at her and the babe unborn when she called him husband; and there was another woman—a woman of Paris....
"Is it not enough that he had won her heart, then thrown it torn and bleeding into the dirt? Is it not enough that his every word had been false; that he had betrayed her; that he left her without a name for her child? Is it not enough that he had won God's own gift, the love of a pure woman, and that it was to him of such little value that he trampled it beneath his feet; that he made what was priceless a thing of no value—of mockery and derision? Yet all this he did; and can you believe me,—a man pleading with death to wait till he shall finish,—that this was not the worst? As I hope for mercy from the God I am about to face; as I hope for the intercession of the Virgin Mother, it is not!"
After a daughter was born to the luckless dancer, the brother and sister began a wandering that carried them through many lands. Always before them, like an evil star, gleamed the compelling idea, revenge; and after more than a decade it guided them to Mexico, where De Sanchez and General Westbrook were conducting a banking business. They learned that their uncle there had died more than a year previous to their arrival, and that his property had been entirely dissipated in a series of disastrous investments covering a period of several years before his death. The banking concern of De Sanchez & Westbrook were the administrators of the Castillo estate.
"Then, señores, almost without warning came the blackest time of all.
"Of a sudden, a scourge of smallpox fell upon the city, and in a day those who lived in the poorer quarter were dying like flies in a frost. My beloved sister was among the very first upon whom that horrible blight fastened, and she was sorely stricken.