"How for both of us, Juanita?" I asked. "If you find what you want over yonder you'll be a rich lady, and then 'good-bye' to poor Jack."
She started as if frightened, and pressed my arm tighter.
"You have been so good to me that I don't know what to say to you," she continued, disregarding my last speech. "Oh, Jack! if we could only be ourselves, free to act and to do whatsoever we wished, instead of being driven so relentlessly on and on by destiny, how much happier we should be! Do you believe in fate?"
"I believe you are my fate," I replied, pressing her hand with all the ardour of a lover, "and what better fate could I ask?"
"Or what worse?" she said sadly. "Jack, my poor Jack, you don't know how you will hate me some day."
"Never, Juanita, and that I'll swear to."
She was silent for a minute or two. When she spoke again there was a bitterness in her voice I had never heard in it before.
"If I had only known and loved you sooner," she went on, "I might have been a better woman. But I was cursed from the very beginning; cursed with a bad mother, cursed with a bad father, cursed with a beauty that was only a snare for sin; lured to my ruin before I was old enough to understand, driven by poverty and despair to be what I am—a woman at war with all the world. Oh, Jack, may the Holy Mother forbid that you may ever know what my life has been! But there, why should I tell you all this? let us be happy and believe in each other to-night, if only for to-night."
"My darling," I cried with real alarm, noticing that big tears were rolling down her cheeks, "what is the matter? Tell me, and let me comfort you. This monotonous voyage has tired you, to-morrow you will be better. Don't give way just at the time when you want all your nerve."
But my advice came too late; she threw herself into my arms and wept as if her heart would break. I could see that she was thoroughly upset, but what had occasioned it I could not of course understand. Since then, however, I have become wiser, and whenever I think of that night on the schooner's deck, under the shadow of the island, I say to myself, "Well, however she may have acted towards me afterwards, at least Juanita loved me then."