Astonished that the girl should know her secret, unable to understand how she could have learned it, unless for some reason, Lieutenant Ritherdon might have hinted that he hoped such was the case; abashed at the secret being known, Beatrix could but stammer: "Yes--yes--I love him."
"I love him, too!" Zara exclaimed fiercely, hotly; she neither stammering, nor appearing to be put to shame. "I love him too. There must be no crime----"
"You love him!" Beatrix repeated, startled.
"With my whole heart and soul. Do you think our hot blood is not as capable of love as the cold blood that runs in your veins?"
But Beatrix could only whisper again, amazed, "You love him too!"
"I have loved him all my life," Zara said. "I have always loved him. And I will save him."
Then Beatrix understood how they were at cross-purposes, and that this half-savage girl was here, not to save Julian from being murdered so much as to save Sebastian from becoming a murderer.
"Tell me all," she said faintly, sinking into her chair, while she motioned to Zara to seat herself in one of the others that stood close by. "Tell me all that has happened. Then I shall know perhaps what I am to do."
And Zara, smothering in her heart the hatred that she felt against this other girl so much more fair and attractive than she, she who was but a peasant, almost a slave, while her rival had wealth and bright surroundings--told her all she knew.
She narrated how she had watched by day and night to see that no harm was done to the stranger staying at Desolada: how, sometimes, she had slept on the upper veranda and sometimes in the grounds and gardens, being ever on the watch. And then she told the story of all that had happened, of how Madame Carmaux had tried to shoot Julian in the copse and had herself been struck in the arm by a bullet from Paz's rifle, but to avoid suspicion had, on her return to the house, commenced arranging flowers in a bowl with one hand, she keeping the other, which Zara knew she had hastily bandaged up, out of sight. She told, too, the whole story of the Amancay poison, and described the final scene in the lower room which she had witnessed from the garden where she stood hidden.